Powerful as a Pistol

In the warm, shallow waters of tropical seas lives a tiny crustacean with a remarkably powerful weapon.

The pistol shrimp is a very pretty shrimp. It’s striped like a tiger and about 2 cm long, but it has one enlarged claw that packs a serious punch. When the shrimp is stalking its prey, it snaps its claw together to produce a jet of water from a socket in the claw. This jet travels at speeds up to 62 miles per hour – the speed of a medium-sized tornado!

This jet of water makes a bubble that launches toward the helpless prey. But it’s when the bubble collapses that the real magic happens. The bubble collapses with a boom of 218 decibels – louder than a rocket launch! It collapses with so much pressure that it produces a flash of light and for just a moment, the temperature inside the bubble is the same temperature as the sun! The whole thing happens in a fraction of a second, but it’s powerful enough to stun or kill the shrimp’s prey.

What’s more, if two rival shrimp meet, they’ll compete to see who can make the loudest bang. When a big group of these shrimp get together, they can make quite a noise. To divers, it sounds like the sizzling of cooking bacon, and can get so loud that it can hide whole submarines from detection by sonar.

The shrimp could be in serious trouble if that claw was damaged or broken off. Fortunately, the pistol shrimp has one last surprise in store – if anything happens to the big snapping claw, the smaller one will get bigger to replace it!