Meeting Abstract
One of the most striking features of stomatopod crustaceans, commonly known as mantis shrimp, are the large raptorial appendages that they rapidly and ballistically deploy at targets. These spring-loaded appendages are released during a variety of behaviors, including defense, predation, and habitat manipulation. Though some mantis shrimp can strike at speeds greater than 80 miles per hour, the speed of a strike is highly variable both within an individual as well as among species. In general, species that are specialized to smash hard targets strike much faster than species specialized to spear soft-bodied prey. Using extracellular electrophysiology and high-speed video analysis we investigated how neural activity varies as a function of strike speed in the spot-tail mantis shrimp, Squilla mantis, a spear-type stomatopod. These data reveal distinct variations in neural activity between slow extensions of the limb versus fast strikes. Our electrophysiology results also revealed that strike speed can be predicted by the relative timing of high amplitude spikes in the extensor muscle prior to limb deployment. Also presented are the results from our high-speed video analysis of the kinematics of S. mantis strikes performed in air vs. water. These results provide the groundwork necessary to inform further research characterizing the neural mechanisms that underlie targeting and deployment of stomatopod strikes.
