Sheila Patek Clocks the Fastest Animals

In this video, Sheila Patek, a biologist addicted to measuring speeds of various animals, measures the speed of the mantis shrimp. The mantis shrimp is a small stomatopod which comes in two types, a spearer, which stabs to obtain its food and a smasher, which smashes with its heel to obtain its food. Their names tell it all. These shrimp move at incredible speeds as they quickly react to obtain their food. However, Patek struggled to record these speeds because they moved way to fast, even with the technology she had available at Berkeley where she was working/studying. Therefore, she teamed up with BBC to rent a high speed video system to record these incredible speeds in low light. They were able to slow it down 333x at 5000 frames per second to measure how fast the limb in the smasher mantis shrimp was moving to 'smash' its food. They discovered that it could lash at speeds up to 45 miles per hour in water! She also discovered that many techniques used by these stomatopods were used in architecture such as a saddle-shaped spring on the mantis shrimp. She as well discovered that they had a huge force output of generating over 200 lbs of force in such a small animal.