Peacock Mantis Shrimp

The Peacock Mantis Shrimp, Odontodactylus scyllarus, is a large stomatopod, one of roughly four hundred eighty mantis shrimp species, growing three to eighteen centimeters long and colored mainly green with orange legs and leopard-like spots on the front of its carapace. It lives across the Indo-Pacific from the Mariana Islands to East Africa and south to KwaZulu-Natal, digging U-shaped burrows in loose sediment near the base of coral reefs at depths of three to forty meters. It has an extraordinary visual system with twelve types of photoreceptors, more than any other known animal, letting it detect color and polarized light most animals cannot see. Its hammer-like clubbed appendage strikes at speeds over eighty kilometers an hour, the fastest strike of any living animal, generating accelerations above one hundred thousand meters per second squared and cavitation bubbles that can crack open shells and weaken prey armor.