My favorite faculty talk this summer was by Dr. Shelia Patek, who studies the physics of ultrafast movement in mantis shrimp. Her presentation introduced us to the fastest known organismal movements—jumping in trap-jaw ants, propulsion of spores from fungi, snapping up prey by “spearing” mantis shrimp, and striking snail shells by “smashing” mantis shrimp. As it turns out, the fastest organisms are not chasing evasive prey, as we might expect, but are instead power amplifiers. Dr. Patek studies how spearing and smashing mantis shrimp are able to harness an enormous amount of force in a brief flash of time. These were some of the most important themes that I took away from her talk:
Tradeoffs: One tradeoff is that it takes longer to prepare powerful movements. The mantis shrimp must strike quickly enough to ensure accuracy (before the prey changes course), but this implies a decrease in the power with which it can act, and vice versa.
Dr. Patek also described an evolutionary tradeoff. Phylogenetic analyses showed that the (relatively) slower spearing mantis shrimp evolved before the ultrafast smashing mantis shrimp. After the transition to higher speed, evolutionary change became slower.
Work with what you have: Dr. Patek told us that the first year of her postdoctoral fellowship was not very successful. She had intended to study the sounds produced by mantis shrimp, but she couldn’t get them to make sounds. After a while, she decided to instead study the things that they were doing, like striking snail shells, and this decision eventually led her to her current area of research.
Applications: Dr. Patek described properties that mantis shrimps share with machines, such as the cavitation bubbles that wear away boat propellers over time. She talked about how understanding the physical properties of very fast, very powerful strikes could have applications for ballistics. It made me start to think about how I might be interested in learning more about human solutions that incorporate designs from the natural world—like aircraft design inspired by birds, reversible adhesives based on geckos, near-silent fans and turbines based on the serrated feather shapes that allow owls to fly so quietly. I recently learned that there is a word for this field of study—biomimetics—and I hope to learn more. With such an incredible diversity of features and processes in the natural world, it’s no wonder that many of them are better adapted to certain situations than the solutions that humans have designed so far.
