The shrimp with claws faster than a bullet
- Published
The shrimp with super fast claws is called Alpheus heterochaelis, or snapping shrimp, and lives in the western Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico
Scientists have discovered a tiny baby shrimp with claws which snap closed quicker than a bullet comes out of a gun, which is really fast.
The snapping shrimp uses its super fast claws to knock fish unconscious by shooting a jet of water with an exploding bubble in it at them.
The baby crustacean is only a few millimetres long, no longer than a staple, and weighs just 0.03mg.
But despite its tiny size, it's able to create huge power with its claws and is even 20 times faster than adult snapping shrimp!
A crustacean is a kind of animal which rather than having a skeleton inside, it has a hard shell to hold its body together
Lots of animals are crustaceans, like shrimp, lobsters, crabs and woodlice
Crustaceans often have lots of legs, big antennae and claws (but not always!)
There are lots of different types of shrimp - including the Hooded Shrimp, one of the smallest animals in the ocean
Record breaking shrimp
Scientists say the baby snapping shrimp is a record breaking animal because of the speed of its claws.
They think it's the fastest accelerating reusable body part in water.
Jacob Harrison, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, had to experiment with hundreds of the shrimps by getting them to snap toothpicks with their claws.
Using videos of the claws snapping he worked out the speed of the claws crashing shut.
The videos of the claws were filmed at 300,000 frames per second, which means each second of footage is hundreds of thousands of still images shown in a row.
That allowed researchers to see the shrimps' claws move in super slow motion.
When he did the maths he said he was "completely ecstatic" realising the claws moved at around 30 metres per second and took less than a millisecond to happen.
There are a thousand milliseconds in a second- so that's very quick!
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