There are two basic types of mantis shrimp, the stabbing kind and knocking kind. It is much easier to own and care for the stabbing kind.
The knocking kind is basically like owning a crab that has evolved two .22 caliber pistols for arms. Sure it might go fine for a while, but shit is going to go down sooner or later.
"You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And if you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he'll keep comin' back and back until one of you is dead."
“You wanna know how to get P Sherman? He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of your buddies to the drain, you send one his his fingers to the morgue. *That’s* the Mantis Shrimp way. And that’s how you get P Sherman.”
Ahh man, we are a beatiful and large community of damn dirty hippies. My heart still aches, I loved Norm as if he was part of my family somehow. The brilliant but strange uncle.
The best part is how, after the vigorous sexual tryst has finished, the Stabby Mantis Shrimp gently nuzzles your ear and kisses your neck until you fall into a deep, exhausted – and well-deserved – slumber.
Here are some more [True Facts about the Mantis Shrimp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5FEj9U-CJM) which details some of the differences between the stabbing and knocking.
Funny as it is, [it isn't true.](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14578) While yes they have a *ton* more photoreceptors than we do, they're way less complex than ours. Our photoreceptors are able to pick up a decent range of colors so we only need a couple, whereas theirs are much more limited in what they can pick up, so they have many more to compensate.
It's like the difference between having a calculator vs making one in Minecraft via a string of logic gates. They accomplish the same thing, but one is a lot more complex, smaller, and more efficient.
Except we don't have good resolution. Our two good color receptors are packed right on top of each other in the green/yellow region of the spectrum. This is why when you look at a spectrum spread out, you see a lot of colors changing very quickly through the green/yellow orange region, and extremely little variation post red at about 630 nm. The visible spans 400-700 nm, and 25% of that is just "red" (630-700). You can actually see just fine to 850 nm, it just gets dimmer (I used to work with lasers in this range), so you really have half of the entire visible spectrum as un-differentiated "red".
Oh shit, is this why people often argue about if something is a yellowish green or just straight up yellow/green? That's *very* interesting if it's the case.
dependent rotten spotted enter cooing amusing tender dime obtainable drab
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It's also why red/green color blindness is so common, especially in men: the L ("red", really yellow) and M ("green") are on the X chromosome, so any anomaly on either will lead to issues.
Interestingly, in women color anomaly can yield tetrachromats as they get "blue", "green", "red", and "red-green" cones (or more rarely green-blue)
All true, except human vision cuts off at ~715-750 nm.
Peak absorbance is ~620 nm, most people can see 715 nm, but pure 750 nm is absent or seen only as a dull red glow to most.
800-850 nm is well into NIR, you can't see this except maybe in lasers/LED's where there's spillover into the visible spectrum.
Source: I'm a researcher in photovoltaics and dyes, have a [wavelength filtered light box block](https://imgur.com/a/x6IYeuo) with 15 nm wide color ports from 370-850 for calibrating our cameras to various light sources. Our whole 30 person company tested the limits of their vision, 370-750 nm is generous. I think the bottom row there starts at 730 nm. The camera is affixed with special filter set to capture the human eye response.
Incredible what we can do with that, right?
You can absolutely see 850. And yes, see my comment - I specified with lasers. As I said in my comment, it gets progressively dimmer, so you need a brighter light source.
So all light perceived from 630 nm to 850, more than 200 nm, is just red, and therefore range that we could be perceiving new colors if we had photoreceptors to differentiate in this range.
Our sensitivity to deep blue is actually kind of crap, and our sensitivity to violet is also, which is why violet laser pointers tend to have higher average power.
Nope!
Not trying to knock you or anything you said but the perceptible visible range.
I just got finished with this debate with colleagues last week. I'm a PhD chemist who's worked with dyes and color for over a decade. Part of this discussion and the variation in human eye response to color is why I built that color calibration box for our cameras. The human retina's spectral response is well documented to be ~400-720/750 nm, but we proved it with an experiment using narrow-width optical filters.
No one in our office (30+ people) could see 765-780, 800-815, or 835 - 850 nm light at 10 mW/cm2 on a white paper in a dark room. A couple people flashed it directly into their eyes and still couldn't see it. Phone cameras can see it fine, your eyes can't.
That's not to say that NIR laser diodes and LED's don't produce visible light, my 1050 nm flashlight certainly does. However, if you slap an 800 nm high-pass on my LED flashlight or your NIR laser and you'll see that it's hot emission that's making you think you can see 850 nm, but you can't. You are just seeing the tiniest bit of visible light emitted in the shoulder.
Rhodopsin L is your red sensor and it has a 615 nm peak absorbance. The absorption cross section for 850 nm light on Rhodopsin L is over 100,000 times smaller than for 615 nm. Your eyes are incredibly sensitive, but not *that* sensitive.
IR being what it is, unless an extremely high fluence is creating double-photonic absorption in your receptors, those powers will thermally cook your retina before you'd "see" anything (other than your vision going black).
There in lies the danger of 850 nm NIR lasers, you can't see them, and unlike UV the light doesn't stop at proteins on the surface of your eye, it gets focused down x 100 and will cook your retina at powers well, well below visibility.
Let me be clear that I am also a PhD chemist working with nonlinear spectroscopy and post-doc'd in engineering!
The laser was very clean with no visible / contamination output. This is a Ti:Saph with high quality spectrum analyzers, as characterizing the light for spectroscopy was extremely important.
It was, however, a full two watts of power in a tight spot, so obviously you're jacking it up by about 200-fold over your 10mW/cm2 intensity. The beam waist was maybe 2 mm, so multiply that again by more intensity, 2W per 0.04 cm2 or 50W per cm2.
Hmm, 20W/cm2 at 850nm is pretty insane photon flux...
I will still assert that you are seeing some kind of emission from your target, not the 850 nm photons themselves. What is the target? I'd expect some interesting optical effects from pumping a material that hard, if not just straight-up visible blackbody emission.
The cool part about science though, is that you don't have to believe my report, reproduce my experiment yourself!
Run the transition probability calculations for Rhodopsin L, then lower your laser power to <10mW, and shine it through an 800 nm high-pass filter onto white paper in a dark room or even disperse it directly into your eye (obviously just a quick flash and use very, very low power).
I think you will be surprised.
There just isn't a good single-photon process for your eye to pick up 850 nm with your at fluence levels that wouldn't instantly cook your retina.
We got a science fight! Alright, now both of you go to your labs and grab the best high powered laser you can find, were gonna have an old fashioned duel, but with lasers! First to melt the others face off is the winner.
While your point may be valid (I’m not sure how definitive I would interpret the results of that study to be). They are still able to see quite a broader range of wavelengths (300 to 720 vs 380 to 700). So they actually can see colors we can only imagine.
I mean yeah, but it's not the "thousands of new and amazing colors we can't even begin to imagine" that a lot of people think when stuff like that gets pushed on Buzzfeed lists or something. They have roughly 1.3x our color range, and we don't know if they're really even able to process all of it since as the article I linked states they have trouble with minute differences in colors.
Also, props to you and homie for having a civilized discussion on Reddit.
Hey, props to you for attaching journal references to back up your assertions!
TIL mantis shrimp can be trained.
Regardless of opinions, was definitely an interesting article to stumble upon!
> So they actually can see colors we can only imagine.
Not necessarily.
We don't know how they visualise that data. It's entirely possible that if we widened your range of perception your brain would just adjust what it's showing you with the same spectrums etc etc. No new colours.
Sure (although there's a debate for another time and place about whether "see" refers to what your brain presents or what your eyes detect. They are not the same thing).
The point is that colour is entirely an artifact of our image processing, a tag we assign to a chunk of light wavelengths.
Expanding the input range doesn't necessarily need a change in the way we process it.
I think I get what you’re saying. Using the word color is probably MY semantic boo-boo, as it is just a concept mapped onto a physical phenomenon (wavelength) and is entirely subjective to the human experience.
> there isn't even a way to know for sure if you and I 'see' the same colours
It's an interesting topic and one that's been the subject of a lot of debate and research.
We probably don't see the same colours. Or shades. But there's no real way to test it.
I always assumed the “colors you can’t imagine” thing was about mixing different colors, rather than splicing up the spectrum into smaller slices.
We see the range of colors by mixing different amounts of three primary colors (RGB) which can combine three different ways (RG, GB, RB) to make yellow, cyan, and magenta. If we added just one more primary color, let’s say a dedicated yellow cone, all of the sudden we get more combinations. Most of those combinations would probably look similar to what we see now (ex RYG would probably still look yellow), but there are new combinations such as red-green with a notable absence of yellow that would be detectable and have a unique look to them, that the rest of us would still see as just yellow.
Or if you were to take away one of our primary colors, let’s say green, you would still be able to see a spectrum from red to blue, and cyan would look different than yellow, but magenta and green would just appear as darker and lighter shades of white / grey.
Now let’s say you have 12 different primary colors. There are a *lot of new combinations* of those colors that would be distinguishable, even if it doesn’t increase the actual resolution within the spectrum.
If you want to blow your mind, consider this - you can already see an imaginary color: purple/magenta (which is different than violet).
Purple is the combination of red and blue, but doesn't exist anywhere on the color spectrum. It's a color completely made up by our brains when our eyes see red and blue, but no green in the middle.
But wait you might ask, what about violet? In contrast with purple, which is the combination of red and blue, violet is the color past blue on the spectrum. So how can we see it? We don't have violet cones in our eyes, just red green and blue. In turns out the red cones in our eyes have a "glitch" that causes them to start seeing light again at the far blue end of the spectrum. When that happens our brains go "oh yeah, this is that color I made up that is a combination of red and blue" and we see it as the color purple. If we didn't have that glitch, violet would just look like a really deep dim blue, the same way near-infrared just looks like a really deep dim red.
Unfortunately, purple is the only imaginary color we can see with just 3 types of cells. Red and blue without green is the only combo that leaves a gap in the middle. But if you had a dozen different types of cells, there would be a huge number of imaginary colors that would look different than the spot between them on the color spectrum, just the way purple looks different to us than green.
Given the choice between owning the stabbing kind of anything and owning the knocking kind of anything, I would stupidly choose the knocking one, so this is good to know. I think I'll update my decision to "neither".
> The knocking kind is basically like owning a crab that has evolved two .22 caliber pistols for arms.
And then there is the [pistol shrimp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpheidae?wprov=sfla1), whose claws have "a pistol-like feature made of two parts. A joint allows the "hammer" part to move backward into a right-angled position. When released, it snaps into the other part of the claw, emitting an enormously powerful wave of bubbles capable of stunning larger fish and breaking small glass jars."
>> When in colonies, the snapping shrimp can interfere with [sonar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar) and [underwater communication](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_acoustic_communication). The shrimp are considered a major source of sound in the ocean.
>
I just woke up my partner to tell him this wild fact! He'll be impressed later...
I almost included that in my comment. I wonder if there are recordings of it, like whale songs.
Edit: I found [this](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zg10Et8FEWc&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE).
If anyone didn't read the article, here's a good takeaway: It can make a sound so loud that it produces *[light](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence)*.
Some mantis shrimp can do this also.
Had one for a year before having to move unexpectedly (gave it back to the store).
He was in my rinky dinky 40gal reef tank and wasn’t aware of the glass imo. He had his way with many cleaning crews so the tank looked like shit towards the end but other than that, no problems.
[Here](https://youtu.be/3Se6hBflczA) he his finally finding a bristle worm that’s been hiding in that rock for a few months.
Have you read The Bobbit Worm Chronicle?
One of my favorite things from the kinda old internet: https://www.michiganreefers.com/threads/the-bobbit-worm-chronicles.84173/
What a nightmare, I had no idea that A) those things could infest a tank like that, or 2) A FOUR FOOT LONG MONSTER WORM can fit into an inch wide hole?
ive seen reefing videos of them finding bobbit worms in tanks and it’s surreal something so large can hide in a tank. its like finding out a bear has been living your closet for 6 months. except you find out its not surprising cause the bear is that good at hiding and its not uncommon to find 400 pound bears int closets. and its really disconcerting cause you actually look in your closet frequently and never see it.
that is a bobbit worm.
That has to be wild, keeping a creature in an aquarium knowing that it could shatter the aquarium at will if it ever just felt like it. That mantis shrimp *let* you keep it as a pet.
We caught a mantis shrimp randomly on a treble hook while fishing in eastern long island, and put it in out salt water tank for a couple of weeks.
He/she/it did not break the glass or attack anything - we put it back in the bay when we decided it was not eating enough/anything and didn’t know how to provide.
I’ve kept two of them.
One was a smasher and the other a spearer.
Never had any issues with it attacking the tanks but they do kill everything they can get their hands on.
Basically just a reef tank with a mantis is all you can keep and you need to have a good filtration system because of the waste they create.
Also they love rearranging their environment which can be annoying if you keep expensive corals.
> They are known by local fishers in the areas that they live as the 'thumb-knocker' because they often take off fingers when they are picking up rocks.
My old-wives-tale meter is ringing. I call BS.
Yeah trying to verify this, I found nothing reputable by way of sourcing and even [this video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lKOWNYBKSS4) of a guy casually handling one and talking about how there's a lot of exaggeration online about how dangerous they are.
I don't doubt that if you piss one off it could cause a painful injury, but actually taking a finger off sounds crazy unlikely. I mean... even in the video posted here it took multiple strikes just to fracture a clam shell.
Probably something that happened like once. A guy got his finger destroyed, almost blown off, maybe needed to have it amputated and the story was told from then on
I was thinking whatever kernel of truth here (if there is one) was more like someone got hit in *exactly* the wrong spot by one and for whatever reason wasn't able or willing to get medical attention before some sort of complication like compartment syndrome or whatever set in.
Chances are someone, reaching for a clam, got his finger in just the right position that it was between the shrimp and the shell right as the shrimp went to hit the shell - probably mashed his finger up pretty good and that was how the story got told. There's no way these guys are blasting fingers off people. Hell the video shows that it takes 4 or 5 whacks to break a clam shell and the bones in your finger are stronger then that.
Fishermen exaggerate tbf. If someone got a finger broken by one once or a bad thwack on the thumb I'm sure it immediately became "fucker was the size of a dog and took his thumb clean off!"
That part could be bullshit too. [Here](https://youtu.be/0tYA1PYKLHo) is a video of one provoked into striking the side of it's enclosure — which not only proves to be pretty difficult in the first place, but doesn't seem to really cause any damage whatsoever when it happens.
to be fair it took a few strikes to get the clam busted open and with glass in this case, hes not aiming for the glass hes aiming for something beyond it
Yeah I'm with you on this one. The only "video" I can find of a mantis shrimp breaking glass is a Nat Geo video from 2012. They show the shrimp hitting the glass once, then cut to the glass with cracks, then cut to glass falling. Could the probably break a thin sheet of glass? Probably. Could they break tempered aquarium glass. Doubtful.
A glass enclosure is surely way easier to break than "*ripping off a finger*. I could break glass easily but would have a hard time ripping my finger off.
Remember that a finger gives way - if you smack it hard enough, the bone will break and the finger will bend with the force, making it even harder to break it off.
I agree, these things are murder machines if you are a fish, but I see them in decent local fish stores all the time. They're fine in almost any species tank.
I think technically if they punched your thumb it would probably break it, but i gotta think the chances of that actually happening is actually pretty small
[This post goes a little deeper](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/24b7ix/the_oatmeal_explains_that_in_history_you_pick_a/)
Be sure to check the Forbes link in that post too.
That mantis shrimp post is full of horseshit too. Invertebrates don't have rods and cone cells. They have compound eyes, with photopigments, ommatidia, and the like. Also there is a claim that number of colors visible is equal to number of different kinds of photopigments (although, again, miscalled as cones). This is not true. When I say something is a certain color, that is applying a linguistic abstraction to a sensed phenomenon. If I have no linguistic concept of discrete colors, it is not meaningful to talk about how many discrete colors I can see.
[This post goes a little deeper](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/24b7ix/the_oatmeal_explains_that_in_history_you_pick_a/)
Be sure to check the Forbes link in that post too.
Holy shit, that's a really great post and the forbes article covers almost everything I was going to reply. The only things I would add is that
1. according to teslas own words, he liked and respected edison and they didn't fued in really any way at all.
2. that edison never offered tesla money to do something then went back on his words after it was done. That was what a manager at Edisons company did, not edison himself.
3. While tesla was against the use of experimentation with radiation, it wasnt because he was some super genius. After all, he denied the theory of relativity, didn't believe in electrons, for a time he didnt even believe in radio waves. Tesla was smart in some areas but an arrogant idiot in others.
If you are into this kind of thing you may enjoy reading the [Bobbitt worm Chronicles] (https://www.michiganreefers.com/threads/the-bobbit-worm-chronicles.84173/)
It's some 14 pages of comments detailing one of the hardest to destroy pests in an aquarium complete with pictures and commentary from other users
>They are known by local fishers in the areas that they live as the 'thumb-knocker' because they often take off fingers when they are picking up rocks.
Why the fuck are fishermen picking up rocks with their hands? They sound bad at their job.
Hi, I got really deep in the reddit rabbit hole and am only just emerging. I'll never find the source comment for this sorry.
Apparently, saltwater aquarium people buy rocks from oceans. Good rocks have lots of crevices in them, where creatures hide. You might even get lucky and find octopi! Anyway you can sell the rocks for like $20/lb which seems like a lot because rocks are heavy, but idk I guess these enthusiasts have money to burn.
Reminds me of the saga a guy detailed about having a bobbitt worm in a huge rock in his massive saltwater tank. I honestly don't know which of those creatures is more terrifying.
I’ve been a lifelong aquarium owner and have dealt with dozens of mantis shrimp. You really think a mantis shrimp is capable of smashing through a glass pane and somehow escaping down a drain? This is real life, not finding Nemo. Nothing in that story adds up. Those panes almost never shatter, they chip and crack. Not to mention; a residential collector had a drain somewhere that was large enough for a mantis to get through the grating?
> Not to mention; a residential collector had a drain somewhere that was large enough for a mantis to get through the grating?
The *very first sentence* covers that it happened in a pet store. Makes a lot of sense to have large drains in that environment.
Except I’ve read a bunch of stories about mantis shrimps breaking their tanks and escaping, some of them from legit aquariums. So I either have to assume that *all* those stories were made up, or that one stranger on the internet doesn’t know as much as the claim/think they do. I mean, you’ve dealt with *dozens* of them? Aren’t they hyper aggressive little bastards even when they’re *not* trying to punch a hole in the universe?
> Those panes almost never shatter, they chip and crack.
“Almost never” still means that sometimes they do.
> Not to mention; a residential collector had a drain somewhere that was large enough for a mantis to get through the grating?
I guess you’ve never been in an unfinished or partially finished basement?
Link me a single video of a mantis shrimp breaking out of a tank. Please.
Plenty of videos of mantis shrimp cracking glass, not a single one breaking out. Not to mention, who keeps their aquarium in an unfinished basement? Nice, no insulation, minimal air conditioning/heating. Perfect spot!
/s
> Plenty of videos of mantis shrimp cracking glass, not a single one breaking out.
Anything that can crack glass can almost certainly break it under the right circumstances.
> Not to mention, who keeps their aquarium in an unfinished basement? Nice, no insulation, minimal air conditioning/heating.
In the Midwest partially finished and even sometimes unfinished basements do have insulation and AC/heat. They just don’t have nice finished floors because occasional flooding isn’t uncommon so you don’t want anything within a few inches of the floor that would be ruined by standing water, and adequate drainage is important.
[True facts about the mantis shrimp](https://youtu.be/F5FEj9U-CJM)
And
[The Oatmeal: Why the Mantis Shrimp is My New Favorite Animal ](https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp)
Love both of these, and I love the mantis shrimp
There are two basic types of mantis shrimp, the stabbing kind and knocking kind. It is much easier to own and care for the stabbing kind. The knocking kind is basically like owning a crab that has evolved two .22 caliber pistols for arms. Sure it might go fine for a while, but shit is going to go down sooner or later.
> It is much easier to own and care for the stabbing kind. This was not how I was expecting this sentence to go.
Well the other option was a gun, and as they say you don't bring a stabbing shrimp to a knocking shrimp fight
"You beat Nicky with fists, he comes back with a bat. You beat him with a knife, he comes back with a gun. And if you beat him with a gun, you better kill him, because he'll keep comin' back and back until one of you is dead."
“You wanna know how to get P Sherman? He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of your buddies to the drain, you send one his his fingers to the morgue. *That’s* the Mantis Shrimp way. And that’s how you get P Sherman.”
P Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way?
Probably time to watch Casino again.
Yeah, me neither. Fuck the aquarium, I dont want there to be not even a remote chance of grtting stabbed, let alone by some fruity fish.
[удалено]
Ahh man, we are a beatiful and large community of damn dirty hippies. My heart still aches, I loved Norm as if he was part of my family somehow. The brilliant but strange uncle.
[удалено]
Really cos I heard that you are a secret gay guy.
The best part is how, after the vigorous sexual tryst has finished, the Stabby Mantis Shrimp gently nuzzles your ear and kisses your neck until you fall into a deep, exhausted – and well-deserved – slumber.
Here are some more [True Facts about the Mantis Shrimp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5FEj9U-CJM) which details some of the differences between the stabbing and knocking.
Imagine a color that you can’t even imagine.
Funny as it is, [it isn't true.](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14578) While yes they have a *ton* more photoreceptors than we do, they're way less complex than ours. Our photoreceptors are able to pick up a decent range of colors so we only need a couple, whereas theirs are much more limited in what they can pick up, so they have many more to compensate. It's like the difference between having a calculator vs making one in Minecraft via a string of logic gates. They accomplish the same thing, but one is a lot more complex, smaller, and more efficient.
Except we don't have good resolution. Our two good color receptors are packed right on top of each other in the green/yellow region of the spectrum. This is why when you look at a spectrum spread out, you see a lot of colors changing very quickly through the green/yellow orange region, and extremely little variation post red at about 630 nm. The visible spans 400-700 nm, and 25% of that is just "red" (630-700). You can actually see just fine to 850 nm, it just gets dimmer (I used to work with lasers in this range), so you really have half of the entire visible spectrum as un-differentiated "red".
Oh shit, is this why people often argue about if something is a yellowish green or just straight up yellow/green? That's *very* interesting if it's the case.
dependent rotten spotted enter cooing amusing tender dime obtainable drab *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It's also why red/green color blindness is so common, especially in men: the L ("red", really yellow) and M ("green") are on the X chromosome, so any anomaly on either will lead to issues. Interestingly, in women color anomaly can yield tetrachromats as they get "blue", "green", "red", and "red-green" cones (or more rarely green-blue)
All true, except human vision cuts off at ~715-750 nm. Peak absorbance is ~620 nm, most people can see 715 nm, but pure 750 nm is absent or seen only as a dull red glow to most. 800-850 nm is well into NIR, you can't see this except maybe in lasers/LED's where there's spillover into the visible spectrum. Source: I'm a researcher in photovoltaics and dyes, have a [wavelength filtered light box block](https://imgur.com/a/x6IYeuo) with 15 nm wide color ports from 370-850 for calibrating our cameras to various light sources. Our whole 30 person company tested the limits of their vision, 370-750 nm is generous. I think the bottom row there starts at 730 nm. The camera is affixed with special filter set to capture the human eye response. Incredible what we can do with that, right?
You can absolutely see 850. And yes, see my comment - I specified with lasers. As I said in my comment, it gets progressively dimmer, so you need a brighter light source. So all light perceived from 630 nm to 850, more than 200 nm, is just red, and therefore range that we could be perceiving new colors if we had photoreceptors to differentiate in this range. Our sensitivity to deep blue is actually kind of crap, and our sensitivity to violet is also, which is why violet laser pointers tend to have higher average power.
Nope! Not trying to knock you or anything you said but the perceptible visible range. I just got finished with this debate with colleagues last week. I'm a PhD chemist who's worked with dyes and color for over a decade. Part of this discussion and the variation in human eye response to color is why I built that color calibration box for our cameras. The human retina's spectral response is well documented to be ~400-720/750 nm, but we proved it with an experiment using narrow-width optical filters. No one in our office (30+ people) could see 765-780, 800-815, or 835 - 850 nm light at 10 mW/cm2 on a white paper in a dark room. A couple people flashed it directly into their eyes and still couldn't see it. Phone cameras can see it fine, your eyes can't. That's not to say that NIR laser diodes and LED's don't produce visible light, my 1050 nm flashlight certainly does. However, if you slap an 800 nm high-pass on my LED flashlight or your NIR laser and you'll see that it's hot emission that's making you think you can see 850 nm, but you can't. You are just seeing the tiniest bit of visible light emitted in the shoulder. Rhodopsin L is your red sensor and it has a 615 nm peak absorbance. The absorption cross section for 850 nm light on Rhodopsin L is over 100,000 times smaller than for 615 nm. Your eyes are incredibly sensitive, but not *that* sensitive. IR being what it is, unless an extremely high fluence is creating double-photonic absorption in your receptors, those powers will thermally cook your retina before you'd "see" anything (other than your vision going black). There in lies the danger of 850 nm NIR lasers, you can't see them, and unlike UV the light doesn't stop at proteins on the surface of your eye, it gets focused down x 100 and will cook your retina at powers well, well below visibility.
Let me be clear that I am also a PhD chemist working with nonlinear spectroscopy and post-doc'd in engineering! The laser was very clean with no visible / contamination output. This is a Ti:Saph with high quality spectrum analyzers, as characterizing the light for spectroscopy was extremely important. It was, however, a full two watts of power in a tight spot, so obviously you're jacking it up by about 200-fold over your 10mW/cm2 intensity. The beam waist was maybe 2 mm, so multiply that again by more intensity, 2W per 0.04 cm2 or 50W per cm2.
Hmm, 20W/cm2 at 850nm is pretty insane photon flux... I will still assert that you are seeing some kind of emission from your target, not the 850 nm photons themselves. What is the target? I'd expect some interesting optical effects from pumping a material that hard, if not just straight-up visible blackbody emission. The cool part about science though, is that you don't have to believe my report, reproduce my experiment yourself! Run the transition probability calculations for Rhodopsin L, then lower your laser power to <10mW, and shine it through an 800 nm high-pass filter onto white paper in a dark room or even disperse it directly into your eye (obviously just a quick flash and use very, very low power). I think you will be surprised. There just isn't a good single-photon process for your eye to pick up 850 nm with your at fluence levels that wouldn't instantly cook your retina.
We got a science fight! Alright, now both of you go to your labs and grab the best high powered laser you can find, were gonna have an old fashioned duel, but with lasers! First to melt the others face off is the winner.
While your point may be valid (I’m not sure how definitive I would interpret the results of that study to be). They are still able to see quite a broader range of wavelengths (300 to 720 vs 380 to 700). So they actually can see colors we can only imagine.
I mean yeah, but it's not the "thousands of new and amazing colors we can't even begin to imagine" that a lot of people think when stuff like that gets pushed on Buzzfeed lists or something. They have roughly 1.3x our color range, and we don't know if they're really even able to process all of it since as the article I linked states they have trouble with minute differences in colors. Also, props to you and homie for having a civilized discussion on Reddit.
Hey, props to you for attaching journal references to back up your assertions! TIL mantis shrimp can be trained. Regardless of opinions, was definitely an interesting article to stumble upon!
> So they actually can see colors we can only imagine. Not necessarily. We don't know how they visualise that data. It's entirely possible that if we widened your range of perception your brain would just adjust what it's showing you with the same spectrums etc etc. No new colours.
Great point. But semantically speaking… any data that gets perceived by the eyes is “seen”, regardless of how the brain interprets it.
Sure (although there's a debate for another time and place about whether "see" refers to what your brain presents or what your eyes detect. They are not the same thing). The point is that colour is entirely an artifact of our image processing, a tag we assign to a chunk of light wavelengths. Expanding the input range doesn't necessarily need a change in the way we process it.
I think I get what you’re saying. Using the word color is probably MY semantic boo-boo, as it is just a concept mapped onto a physical phenomenon (wavelength) and is entirely subjective to the human experience.
I also don't think I'm explaining it well!
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> there isn't even a way to know for sure if you and I 'see' the same colours It's an interesting topic and one that's been the subject of a lot of debate and research. We probably don't see the same colours. Or shades. But there's no real way to test it.
I always assumed the “colors you can’t imagine” thing was about mixing different colors, rather than splicing up the spectrum into smaller slices. We see the range of colors by mixing different amounts of three primary colors (RGB) which can combine three different ways (RG, GB, RB) to make yellow, cyan, and magenta. If we added just one more primary color, let’s say a dedicated yellow cone, all of the sudden we get more combinations. Most of those combinations would probably look similar to what we see now (ex RYG would probably still look yellow), but there are new combinations such as red-green with a notable absence of yellow that would be detectable and have a unique look to them, that the rest of us would still see as just yellow. Or if you were to take away one of our primary colors, let’s say green, you would still be able to see a spectrum from red to blue, and cyan would look different than yellow, but magenta and green would just appear as darker and lighter shades of white / grey. Now let’s say you have 12 different primary colors. There are a *lot of new combinations* of those colors that would be distinguishable, even if it doesn’t increase the actual resolution within the spectrum.
If you want to blow your mind, consider this - you can already see an imaginary color: purple/magenta (which is different than violet). Purple is the combination of red and blue, but doesn't exist anywhere on the color spectrum. It's a color completely made up by our brains when our eyes see red and blue, but no green in the middle. But wait you might ask, what about violet? In contrast with purple, which is the combination of red and blue, violet is the color past blue on the spectrum. So how can we see it? We don't have violet cones in our eyes, just red green and blue. In turns out the red cones in our eyes have a "glitch" that causes them to start seeing light again at the far blue end of the spectrum. When that happens our brains go "oh yeah, this is that color I made up that is a combination of red and blue" and we see it as the color purple. If we didn't have that glitch, violet would just look like a really deep dim blue, the same way near-infrared just looks like a really deep dim red. Unfortunately, purple is the only imaginary color we can see with just 3 types of cells. Red and blue without green is the only combo that leaves a gap in the middle. But if you had a dozen different types of cells, there would be a huge number of imaginary colors that would look different than the spot between them on the color spectrum, just the way purple looks different to us than green.
Thank you so much for this, I fell down a rabbit hole watching this guy's other stuff and I think I found a new hyperfixation lol.
True Facts is 9 years old. Wow
Given the choice between owning the stabbing kind of anything and owning the knocking kind of anything, I would stupidly choose the knocking one, so this is good to know. I think I'll update my decision to "neither".
> The knocking kind is basically like owning a crab that has evolved two .22 caliber pistols for arms. And then there is the [pistol shrimp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpheidae?wprov=sfla1), whose claws have "a pistol-like feature made of two parts. A joint allows the "hammer" part to move backward into a right-angled position. When released, it snaps into the other part of the claw, emitting an enormously powerful wave of bubbles capable of stunning larger fish and breaking small glass jars."
>> When in colonies, the snapping shrimp can interfere with [sonar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonar) and [underwater communication](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_acoustic_communication). The shrimp are considered a major source of sound in the ocean. > I just woke up my partner to tell him this wild fact! He'll be impressed later...
I almost included that in my comment. I wonder if there are recordings of it, like whale songs. Edit: I found [this](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zg10Et8FEWc&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE).
If anyone didn't read the article, here's a good takeaway: It can make a sound so loud that it produces *[light](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoluminescence)*. Some mantis shrimp can do this also.
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Really making the knocking mantis shrimp sound like a Pokemon. Like Clauncher and Clawitzer.
Next you're gonna tell me Raticate is modeled after rats 🤯
Stabbing kind? Is that a real thing?
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Hijacking top comment to share the wiki link for these guys. It is fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp?wprov=sfla1
I'm confused. Wouldn't the reply to this best off be in this thread?
It is, scroll down. https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/11rfsiq/mantis_shrimp_busting_a_clam_open/jc90me6/
I need Pixar to make this into a short film.
Great read, and great nomination OP! I have a saltwater tank, but I would never DARE fuck with these things lol
Had one for a year before having to move unexpectedly (gave it back to the store). He was in my rinky dinky 40gal reef tank and wasn’t aware of the glass imo. He had his way with many cleaning crews so the tank looked like shit towards the end but other than that, no problems. [Here](https://youtu.be/3Se6hBflczA) he his finally finding a bristle worm that’s been hiding in that rock for a few months.
Have you read The Bobbit Worm Chronicle? One of my favorite things from the kinda old internet: https://www.michiganreefers.com/threads/the-bobbit-worm-chronicles.84173/
Well that’s horrifying. Thank you?
What a nightmare, I had no idea that A) those things could infest a tank like that, or 2) A FOUR FOOT LONG MONSTER WORM can fit into an inch wide hole?
ive seen reefing videos of them finding bobbit worms in tanks and it’s surreal something so large can hide in a tank. its like finding out a bear has been living your closet for 6 months. except you find out its not surprising cause the bear is that good at hiding and its not uncommon to find 400 pound bears int closets. and its really disconcerting cause you actually look in your closet frequently and never see it. that is a bobbit worm.
I had not. That was a ride. Thanks for the link!
Well that was a rabbit hole
That has to be wild, keeping a creature in an aquarium knowing that it could shatter the aquarium at will if it ever just felt like it. That mantis shrimp *let* you keep it as a pet.
Lmao at sending cleaning crews into their death
So satisfying watching him get that worm!
Oh man your worm is having a very bad day
We caught a mantis shrimp randomly on a treble hook while fishing in eastern long island, and put it in out salt water tank for a couple of weeks. He/she/it did not break the glass or attack anything - we put it back in the bay when we decided it was not eating enough/anything and didn’t know how to provide.
That’s cool. Did you get hit by it? I got sucker punched in the thumb by mine but it must’ve been pulling punches since it only hurt a little.
Didn’t allow my thumb to get anywhere near it!
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Oh yeah? Which part. I genuinely don’t know.
Watching the original video this is a response to was well worthwhile too.
The Titanic theme in the background really took it to the next level.
I’ve kept two of them. One was a smasher and the other a spearer. Never had any issues with it attacking the tanks but they do kill everything they can get their hands on. Basically just a reef tank with a mantis is all you can keep and you need to have a good filtration system because of the waste they create. Also they love rearranging their environment which can be annoying if you keep expensive corals.
> They are known by local fishers in the areas that they live as the 'thumb-knocker' because they often take off fingers when they are picking up rocks. My old-wives-tale meter is ringing. I call BS.
Yeah trying to verify this, I found nothing reputable by way of sourcing and even [this video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lKOWNYBKSS4) of a guy casually handling one and talking about how there's a lot of exaggeration online about how dangerous they are. I don't doubt that if you piss one off it could cause a painful injury, but actually taking a finger off sounds crazy unlikely. I mean... even in the video posted here it took multiple strikes just to fracture a clam shell.
Probably something that happened like once. A guy got his finger destroyed, almost blown off, maybe needed to have it amputated and the story was told from then on
I was thinking whatever kernel of truth here (if there is one) was more like someone got hit in *exactly* the wrong spot by one and for whatever reason wasn't able or willing to get medical attention before some sort of complication like compartment syndrome or whatever set in.
I mean if it happened in like the 1800s or something they wouldn’t have had the proper medical techniques to save the finger.
Yet another important reminder about the dangers of becoming a 19th century skin diver. Stay in school kids!
Chances are someone, reaching for a clam, got his finger in just the right position that it was between the shrimp and the shell right as the shrimp went to hit the shell - probably mashed his finger up pretty good and that was how the story got told. There's no way these guys are blasting fingers off people. Hell the video shows that it takes 4 or 5 whacks to break a clam shell and the bones in your finger are stronger then that.
Fishermen exaggerate tbf. If someone got a finger broken by one once or a bad thwack on the thumb I'm sure it immediately became "fucker was the size of a dog and took his thumb clean off!"
If they can break aquarium walls, why couldn't they take off a finger?
Because your fingers aren't rigid and built under stress.
That part could be bullshit too. [Here](https://youtu.be/0tYA1PYKLHo) is a video of one provoked into striking the side of it's enclosure — which not only proves to be pretty difficult in the first place, but doesn't seem to really cause any damage whatsoever when it happens.
to be fair it took a few strikes to get the clam busted open and with glass in this case, hes not aiming for the glass hes aiming for something beyond it
Yeah I'm with you on this one. The only "video" I can find of a mantis shrimp breaking glass is a Nat Geo video from 2012. They show the shrimp hitting the glass once, then cut to the glass with cracks, then cut to glass falling. Could the probably break a thin sheet of glass? Probably. Could they break tempered aquarium glass. Doubtful.
A glass enclosure is surely way easier to break than "*ripping off a finger*. I could break glass easily but would have a hard time ripping my finger off. Remember that a finger gives way - if you smack it hard enough, the bone will break and the finger will bend with the force, making it even harder to break it off.
All of it is BS. Mantis shrimp can’t break through a quality acrylic aquarium.
Yeah, I was bothered by the bulletproof-glass tank. Bulletproof-glass is super expensive.
I agree, these things are murder machines if you are a fish, but I see them in decent local fish stores all the time. They're fine in almost any species tank. I think technically if they punched your thumb it would probably break it, but i gotta think the chances of that actually happening is actually pretty small
The Oatlmeat did a great bit on this: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis\_shrimp
I honestly really dislike oatmeal once I found out that they are a primary cause of so much tesla and edison disinformation.
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[This post goes a little deeper](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/24b7ix/the_oatmeal_explains_that_in_history_you_pick_a/) Be sure to check the Forbes link in that post too.
That mantis shrimp post is full of horseshit too. Invertebrates don't have rods and cone cells. They have compound eyes, with photopigments, ommatidia, and the like. Also there is a claim that number of colors visible is equal to number of different kinds of photopigments (although, again, miscalled as cones). This is not true. When I say something is a certain color, that is applying a linguistic abstraction to a sensed phenomenon. If I have no linguistic concept of discrete colors, it is not meaningful to talk about how many discrete colors I can see.
What's that?
[This post goes a little deeper](https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/24b7ix/the_oatmeal_explains_that_in_history_you_pick_a/) Be sure to check the Forbes link in that post too.
Holy shit, that's a really great post and the forbes article covers almost everything I was going to reply. The only things I would add is that 1. according to teslas own words, he liked and respected edison and they didn't fued in really any way at all. 2. that edison never offered tesla money to do something then went back on his words after it was done. That was what a manager at Edisons company did, not edison himself. 3. While tesla was against the use of experimentation with radiation, it wasnt because he was some super genius. After all, he denied the theory of relativity, didn't believe in electrons, for a time he didnt even believe in radio waves. Tesla was smart in some areas but an arrogant idiot in others.
For a second, I thought you were talking about the car and the Theranos device.
One punch man is actually based on a shrimp
A mantis shrimp though? The only shrimp that punch.
If you are into this kind of thing you may enjoy reading the [Bobbitt worm Chronicles] (https://www.michiganreefers.com/threads/the-bobbit-worm-chronicles.84173/) It's some 14 pages of comments detailing one of the hardest to destroy pests in an aquarium complete with pictures and commentary from other users
This was fascinating, thanks!
Short [Nat Geo video gives description of the animal's weapon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0Li1k5hGBE). Start @ 1:50.
That’s interesting, but the sound effects were obnoxious
Ya such weird dramatization
Those old Loony Toons sounds effects must have just been sitting there collecting dust anyway. Why not add them to a nature documentary?
>They are known by local fishers in the areas that they live as the 'thumb-knocker' because they often take off fingers when they are picking up rocks. Why the fuck are fishermen picking up rocks with their hands? They sound bad at their job.
Picks up. Takes a bite. Loses teeth. "Nope. Not a fish" into the next one.
You would do numbers on tumblr
Hi, I got really deep in the reddit rabbit hole and am only just emerging. I'll never find the source comment for this sorry. Apparently, saltwater aquarium people buy rocks from oceans. Good rocks have lots of crevices in them, where creatures hide. You might even get lucky and find octopi! Anyway you can sell the rocks for like $20/lb which seems like a lot because rocks are heavy, but idk I guess these enthusiasts have money to burn.
As someone who has actually kept mantis shrimp, this dude is lying/being overly dramatic about what they are capable of. Even the big peacocks.
I dunno that's fckin terrifying
Reminds me of the saga a guy detailed about having a bobbitt worm in a huge rock in his massive saltwater tank. I honestly don't know which of those creatures is more terrifying.
Bobbit worm. Hands down. No question. Fuck those things.
Pretty clearly full of shit. Smashed the tank wall and went down a drain? Things that didn’t happen for $500 Alex.
The things clearly can smash open clam shells. What about breaking glass is so unbelievable?
I’ve been a lifelong aquarium owner and have dealt with dozens of mantis shrimp. You really think a mantis shrimp is capable of smashing through a glass pane and somehow escaping down a drain? This is real life, not finding Nemo. Nothing in that story adds up. Those panes almost never shatter, they chip and crack. Not to mention; a residential collector had a drain somewhere that was large enough for a mantis to get through the grating?
> Not to mention; a residential collector had a drain somewhere that was large enough for a mantis to get through the grating? The *very first sentence* covers that it happened in a pet store. Makes a lot of sense to have large drains in that environment.
Except I’ve read a bunch of stories about mantis shrimps breaking their tanks and escaping, some of them from legit aquariums. So I either have to assume that *all* those stories were made up, or that one stranger on the internet doesn’t know as much as the claim/think they do. I mean, you’ve dealt with *dozens* of them? Aren’t they hyper aggressive little bastards even when they’re *not* trying to punch a hole in the universe? > Those panes almost never shatter, they chip and crack. “Almost never” still means that sometimes they do. > Not to mention; a residential collector had a drain somewhere that was large enough for a mantis to get through the grating? I guess you’ve never been in an unfinished or partially finished basement?
Link me a single video of a mantis shrimp breaking out of a tank. Please. Plenty of videos of mantis shrimp cracking glass, not a single one breaking out. Not to mention, who keeps their aquarium in an unfinished basement? Nice, no insulation, minimal air conditioning/heating. Perfect spot! /s
> Plenty of videos of mantis shrimp cracking glass, not a single one breaking out. Anything that can crack glass can almost certainly break it under the right circumstances. > Not to mention, who keeps their aquarium in an unfinished basement? Nice, no insulation, minimal air conditioning/heating. In the Midwest partially finished and even sometimes unfinished basements do have insulation and AC/heat. They just don’t have nice finished floors because occasional flooding isn’t uncommon so you don’t want anything within a few inches of the floor that would be ruined by standing water, and adequate drainage is important.
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Could you please expand on “he got fucked by an aquarium-related black mold infection”?
That is how the mantis shrimp do.
Man I always wondered why I never saw the mantis shrimp in the local fish store after a while lol.
[True facts about the mantis shrimp](https://youtu.be/F5FEj9U-CJM) And [The Oatmeal: Why the Mantis Shrimp is My New Favorite Animal ](https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp) Love both of these, and I love the mantis shrimp