“Punches like a bullet, sees colors you can't even imagine.”

Roughly the size of a remote control, the peacock mantis shrimp is nature's tiny, furious haymaker. It strikes with a spring-loaded club at the speed of a .22 bullet — fast enough to boil the water around its fist into a flash of light and crack aquarium glass, which is why aquarists nervously nickname them "thumb-splitters." As if that weren't enough, its eyes carry up to sixteen types of color receptor (you have three), letting it see ultraviolet and polarized light. Scientists keep expecting this to grant superhuman color vision; instead the shrimp seems to use it for very fast, very lazy color shortcuts. It is gorgeous, heavily armed, and absolutely uninterested in your opinion of it.

Scientific name

Odontodactylus scyllarus

Size

TV-remote sized (up to ~18 cm).

Habitat

Burrows in shallow tropical reefs, Indo-Pacific.

Diet

Snails, crabs, and anything it can punch open.

Conservation

LC · Least Concern

Picnic threat level

Picnic threat: would smash your potato salad bowl on principle.

Cédric Péneau, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons · Learn more →