Bioceramics power the mantis shrimp's famous punch
Thursday, October 18, 2018 - 10:20
in Physics & Chemistry
Researchers in Singapore can now explain what gives the mantis shrimp, a marine crustacean that hunts by battering its prey with its club-like appendages, the most powerful punch in the animal kingdom. In a paper publishing October 19 in the journal iScience, they show that a saddle-shaped structure in the mantis shrimp's limbs, which acts like a spring to store and then release energy, is composed of two layers made of different materials. Measuring the composition and the micro-mechanical properties of the layers—which are mostly bioceramic and mostly biopolymeric, respectively—allowed the researchers to simulate how the saddle stores such large amounts of elastic energy without breaking.