Deep dive 3 min read
Mantis Shrimp Punch: How Fast and How Strong Is It?
It's barely the length of your hand, but it throws one of the fastest punches on the planet. Here's how the mantis shrimp's knockout blow works.
If animals had a boxing championship, the mantis shrimp would win in the first second. This colourful little crustacean throws one of the fastest punches in the animal kingdom, strong enough to smash snail shells, crack crab armour and even break aquarium glass. So how fast and how strong is it, really?
Smashers and spearers
There are around 450 species of mantis shrimp, and they come in two main types. Spearers have spiky, barbed arms for stabbing soft prey like fish. Smashers, like the famous peacock mantis shrimp, have club-shaped arms for hammering hard-shelled prey. When people talk about the mantis shrimp punch, they mean the smashers.
How fast is the punch?
Ridiculously fast. The club can hit speeds of around 23 metres per second, about 80 km/h, underwater. It accelerates more than 10,000 times faster than gravity, and the whole strike is over in a few thousandths of a second. That’s faster than you can blink, many times over.
The fastest punch in the ocean belongs to an animal the size of your hand.
How strong is it?
A single strike can deliver a force of over 1,000 newtons, many hundreds of times the shrimp’s own body weight. For a human, that would be like punching hard enough to throw a car.
The secret: a spring and a latch
Muscles alone can’t move that fast. Instead, the mantis shrimp uses a clever trick. A saddle-shaped part of its arm works like a spring. The shrimp slowly loads it with its muscles while a latch holds the arm in place. When it releases the latch, all that stored energy is set free at once, like a bow firing an arrow.
The punch that hits twice
The club moves so fast that it creates a low-pressure area in the water, forming tiny bubbles. When these bubbles collapse, they release a burst of energy, heat and even a faint flash of light. This effect is called cavitation. So the prey gets hit twice: once by the club and once by the collapsing bubbles.
Strange but trueSpearer mantis shrimp have a nickname among fishermen and divers: “thumb splitters”. Pick one up carelessly and you’ll find out why.
A club that doesn’t break
Why doesn’t the club shatter after thousands of hits? Because it’s built in layers of fibres twisted in a spiral pattern, which stops cracks from spreading. Engineers are studying it to design tougher materials for things like helmets and body armour.
The verdict
The mantis shrimp punch is the perfect mix of speed, power and smart engineering. It’s not a shrimp, by the way: mantis shrimps are a separate, ancient group of crustaceans. Explore more animals with real-life superpowers in our Superpowers collection.
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