You know what a praying mantis is?

The most terrifying living being, the praying mantis.

And this is a spearing mantis shrimp, or stomatopod.

You know what they call her? The praying mantis.

This was how mantis shrimps make these very fast strikes.

So, mantis shrimp come in two varieties there are spearers and smashers.

This is a recording I made of a mantis shrimp that's found off the coast of California.

And mantis shrimp are officially the fastest measured feeding strike of any animal system. So our first surprise.

And mantis shrimp are called mantis shrimp after the praying mantises, which also have a fast feeding appendage. And I started to think, well, maybe it will be interesting, while listening to their sounds, to figure out how these animals generate very fast feeding strikes.

So, actually, I started working on what's called the mantis shrimp a few years ago because they make sound.

And what he showed in mantis shrimp is that they use what's called a catch mechanism, or click mechanism.

Now, the other type of mantis shrimp is the smasher stomatopod, and these guys open up snails for a living.

So this is a mantis shrimp. There are the eyes up here, and there's that raptorial appendage, and there's the heel.

Now, this is pattern thinking. That praying mantis is made from a single sheet of paper no scotch tape, no cuts.

So the next and final question was, well, how much force does a mantis shrimp produce if they're able to break open snails?

And while I was struggling to figure out how and why mantis shrimp, or stomatopods, make sound, I started to think about their appendages.

And then we did a series of calculations, and what we were able to show is that these mantis shrimp have to have a spring.

And if folding a single praying mantis from a single uncut square wasn't interesting enough, then you could do two praying mantises from a single uncut square.

So this is a potent force in fluid systems, and just to sort of take it one step further, I'm going to show you the mantis shrimp approaching the snail.

Biologist Sheila Patek talks about her work measuring the feeding strike of the mantis shrimp, one of the fastest movements in the animal world, using video cameras recording at 20,000 frames per second.

So, a quick strike like that. And if we slow it down a bit, this is the mantis shrimp the same species recorded at 1,000 frames a second, played back at 15 frames per second.

And if any of you ever have a chance, backstage of the National Museum of Natural History is one of the world's best collections of preserved mantis shrimp. And what this is serious business for me.

So, this what I saw, on every single mantis shrimp limb, whether it's a spearer or a smasher, is a beautiful saddle shaped structure right on the top surface of the limb. And you can see it right here.