One of the reasons I always encourage people to critically assess animal organizations is that, at the end of the day, they’re still businesses run by people and they still have the same problems that businesses in other sectors do. The news article linked below is a really stellar example of that. The rest of this post, and that link, require a big CW for sexual assault mentions, victim blaming, and retaliatory behavior for coming forward about misconduct. It’s really rare that there are news articles that look at issues in the zoo world this deeply, without preconceived politics. I think this is a good article because it uses an acute problem to examine a lot of really systemic issues with the way the field (and especially AZA) handles interpersonal politics.

As I talked about a few days ago when posting my writeup on the need for anonymous reporting within accrediting groups, the zoological field runs on a really hierarchical power structure. Violating that - especially by trying to file a complaint about the conduct of someone higher up the ladder - almost certainly will result in social backlash, and often results in retaliation against you by those affected. This is one of those worst-case scenarios: a researcher was assaulted twice at an industry conference by his boss (who controlled his green card); when he reported it later, AZA straight up was like “lol we don’t have to follow our no-tolerance policy and get her in trouble, she’s a well respected zoo director” even though they’d had multiple reports about her behaving inappropriately when drunk at meetings; then, a number of women involved in the SSP that director was part of worked to ruin the victim’s professional reputation, resulting in him being fired from a research position at another AZA zoo. The victim sued them for retaliation and settled out of court for 2.8 million: I think it’s because what was uncovered during discovery and in depositions was so damning for AZA and the people involved that they’d have been creamed if they’d let the case actually go to a jury trial. (I’ve read all the publicly available trial docs and it’s… so bad.)

The zoo director who assaulted him still has her job as of May 10, 2023, and she had to step down from running the SAFE and SSP programs she was involved in (because she was in a position of power over her victim through them, as he researches that species) … but AZA agreed as part of the settlement to not say anything about that, and to not revoke her AZA membership - which would actually be the appropriate consequence for assaulting someone as per their code of conduct. She was the chair of the AZA ethics committee when the report was filed, and while she was removed from that position when the news of the lawsuit first broke in 2021, the settlement clearly indicates nothing prevents her from resuming that position or taking any other position within AZA other than the two programs she was forced to resign from.

What I find really telling in the whole situation is that AZA has all these really nice words in their policies and code of conduct about dealing with harassment or inappropriate behavior on paper - and felt absolutely no obligation to actually follow through with any of it. An email sent out by the CEO in 2018 acknowledges how often misconduct happens at their meetings, and that they were enacting a no-tolerance policy, and wanted to hear about and investigate anything that might happen. When actually called on that by the victim’s lawyers, they scrambled every which way to get out of the responsibility. We never said that, and if we did, we didn’t mean it, and even so we can’t be held accountable because of this reason we just made up. And then, right before the next annual conference last fall, they changed their code of conduct: they took every single piece of the code of conduct where the victim’s lawyers had found language that meant they were responsible for dealing with problems, and edited it so they can never be held accountable for taking action again.

This article is really worth a read. I’ve been following this case closely for a couple years, and the reporter found a lot of details I wasn’t aware of. The article is unbiased in a way a lot of media about zoos is not, and it provides a lot of receipts for the truly appalling choices made by everyone involved. It also looks at the power imbalances and exploitation that occur when an industry markets itself on the value of research and animal programs… which are run by unpaid staff taking on extra work in addition to their regular jobs. What happens to that research or those programs when human politics can and do often interfere? Well.. the researcher who was the victim here actually identified a huge issue with genetic data getting mixed up in the SSP species he studied! But the women who supported the director who assaulted him tried to ice him out of the program in retaliation… meaning if he hadn’t made a stink and instead had just left, quietly, like so many do? AZA wouldn’t know the extent to which their breeding program was accidentally hybridizing two separate species.

It’s a mess. This is one person, one incident, one issue and all of the fallout. How much more of this is happening that we don’t know about? How much of the work that’s marketed as the value of accreditation is impacted by this type of stuff? We just don’t know.

Tigers' stripes are on their skin, not just their fur - but how often do you get to see it?!

This is the female Amur tiger at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium (I can't find her name online, somehow). A sign on the exhibit noted she had recently had medical care and part of her belly had been shaved in the process. A beautiful lady, and those stripes on her skin are just stunning.

What do you do if you see an animal/human safety issue while at a zoo?

A few days ago, I witnessed a lioness find a long piece of rusty wire a guest had shoved into a gap in the fencing… and before I could grab it from the public side, she pulled it through and began chewing on it! I knew how to find someone to address the problem, and she’s fine (they recalled the lions indoors and found where she had dropped it) but it made me realize it’s something not everyone would know as much about.

So, if you’re at a zoological facility and see a safety issue - dropped objects in a habitat, animals eating or playing with something they shouldn’t, people climbing fences or trying to pet animals - here’s how you report it:

In general, it is always way better for you to interrupt someone’s work or cut a line to alert staff to a safety issue than for an animal or person to get hurt. Some zoos have signs posted on grounds with a number to call if you notice a safety issue - it’s a great idea and I’d love to see all facilities do it!

Y'all regularly send in questions wanting to know how to report concerns you've observed at zoos you've visited. I've been able to point people at the USDA (regulatory) option, but with regard to accrediting groups I haven't had a good answer. I spent the last six months or so really digging into why there hasn't been a good answer. What I've found is that the majority of zoological accrediting groups in the United States don't provide any way for the public to report issues they've observed at accredited facilities, and none of said organizations have a mechanism for truly supporting / protecting staff who might choose to report issues at their own facilities. Which is. not great.

I wrote a whole Substack post about it a few days ago, arguing that in order to remain credible institutions accrediting groups must facilitate public reporting, anonymous reporting, and commit to enforcing penalties for any retaliation against staff who choose to utilize the option. I'm linking it below for anyone who is interested in all the details. CW at the beginning for animal abuse mentions - I started the piece by discussing a truly egregious welfare situation that occurred last year at a Miami facility, which might have been prevented or at least caught earlier if the two groups that accredit the facility had had a reporting mechanism in place.

What I want to talk about here, though, is specifically why accrediting orgs need to not only have an anonymous reporting option for staff, but why they must ban retaliation and penalize any facility that does it anyway. Whenever something terrible happens at a zoo or sanctuary, people always ask "why didn't the staff say something?" And the answer is, basically, because taking that risk can get you not just fired, but blacklisted from the field. People literally end up having to choose between their careers and making noise about issues that aren't being resolved, and that's absolutely not freaking okay. But I want to explain for you the extent of the issue.

If you're not industry, something you might be surprised to learn is that most zoo staff don't have any special reporting options above and beyond what the public does. Most zookeepers and other low-level staff never interact with people from accrediting groups except during an actual inspection - so if there's a problem, it's not like they know someone they can back-channel a concern to if they don't feel safe reporting it publicly. And for the most part, reporting things your facility is doing to an accrediting group will always be considered inappropriate and probably get a keeper in trouble (even if it's a really valid issue).

The zoological industry runs on a strongly hierarchical system. Staff are expected to “stay within their lanes” and work within the established bureaucracy to resolve issues. Deviating from this, if staff feel like management are suppressing issues or something needs to be addressed urgently, is very heavily frowned upon. Basically, going around management to bring something to an accrediting group (or USDA, or the media) is seen as indicating that your facility has failed to address a problem, or that the individual making the report feels they know more than their superiors. At most places, no matter how extreme an issue may become, there's never a point at which it would be acceptable for a staff member to reveal a facility’s internal issues to their accrediting body. 

The thing is, attempting to resolve issues through the proper internal channels at a facility doesn't always work! It can result in an issue being covered up (especially if the company is kinda shady) or suppressed rather than addressed. If staff decide to push the issue, it can really backfire and jeopardize their job, because it's expected that if management says something is fine, staff need to acquiesce and go along with it.

There have been a couple high-profile examples of this in the last decade: the incident I mention in my Substack where new management at the Miami Seaquarium decided to starve dolphins to coerce them into participating in guest programs, and an issue at the Austin Zoo five-ish years ago where the director was perpetuating serious welfare issues and ignoring staff feedback. In both cases, there's always the questions of where the accrediting group was. We don't know anything about what happened with the Seaquarium (it's been over six months since the USDA report documenting the diet cuts was released and AMMPA and American Humane haven't said a thing), but I remember hearing that ZAA had no idea what was happening at Austin because nobody had reached out to them about it.

This is why I'm arguing that all zoological accrediting groups need to make visible reporting options and make sure staff feel safe enough to use them! If you've got a facility perpetuating or not dealing with major issues, it's pretty probable that they're going to be unhappy if their staff reports those issues to any oversight body. That's not a situation where it's currently safe to speak up right now - and four out of five zoological accrediting groups in the US don't have standards prohibiting retaliation against staff for bringing up issues like that! (Surprisingly, it's not AZA. It's the sanctuary accrediting group, GFAS). Without any option for internal reporting, issues may not get addressed - which hurts animal welfare - or people risk losing their job, possibly their entire career in the field (which is a huge part of people's identities!), and their financial stability to advocate for their animals.

Currently, the two accrediting groups that do have reporting options (AZA and GFAS) stay they'll attempt to keep reports anonymous, but acknowledge it may not be possible to do so. (Which tracks, because zoo jobs are highly specialized and only a few people may be exposed to an issue). However, only GFAS prohibits facilities from retaliating against people who make reports. On top of that, there's absolutely no transparency about what happens next: GFAS, ZAA, AMMPA and AH have no information about how the process transpires and if someone making a report will get any information back about what happened. AZA straight up says that all accreditation stuff is proprietary (read: confidential) so you just have to trust that they dealt with it appropriately. Just yeet your report into the void and hope the groups doing oversight handle it correctly when there's no accountability? That's... not a great look for animal welfare concerns.

I hope the industry chooses to fix this problem. I hope it chooses to invest in transparency and increased credibility. I don't know what I expect, but I'd like to see these accrediting groups do the right thing.

My full write-up on how accrediting groups in the US handle reporting and concerns (or don't) is linked below.

Please enjoy four peaceful minutes of ASMR, brought to you by an Aldabra giant tortoise eating a head of lettuce at Reptile Gardens in South Dakota. (There’s a little bit of people talking at the beginning, but it’s mostly quiet other than the crunching and the sound of the heaters after that).

🎂 birthday fundraiser!! 🎂 For my 30th birthday, I'm asking for your help raising the funds to purchase a specialized set of PPE that will allow me to safely return to zoo industry meetings and events.

I’m a freelancer, and I’m also disabled, which means the last three years have required some pretty hard choices to protect my health and ability to work. That’s meant giving up doing what I love, including being part of the zoo world. and being completely absent from everything the zoological field is doing. The thing is, the end of Covid precautions mean I can’t safely engage in the conferences that are crucial to my research and the types of things I teach about on this blog. Staying relevant in the field requires being up-to-date on what’s going on (which conferences are ideal for) and the networking at meetings is what builds trust and relationships that help me learn things. I also just miss being part of the zoo world so much. The thing I want most right now is to be able to attend the AZA and ZAA annual conferences this fall - especially because I’m dreaming of submitting an application present my work at both of them, for the first time ever!

I found this really neat PPE kit that should let me attend meetings safely: it’s basically a combination of a mask, a portable HEPA air filter, and a battery pack that you wear as headgear. Because it’s fancy technology, it’s $$$. If you’re able to help contribute towards helping me fund it - even just a couple dollars - I would appreciate it beyond words. This is all a labor of love, and it’s something I want to be able to continue doing for a long time. To do it well, I have to be able to physically get to industry meetings and participate in them to make it work. It’s a major equity issue that industry meetings are choosing to drop Covid-prevention policies and are therefore unsafe and inaccessible to disabled researchers Iike me - but this PPE option gives me the freedom to continue my work without having to risk my health.

Even the smallest amount helps. Thank you so much.

A photo from one of the last meetings I got to attend pre-pandemic, meeting a mountain tapir!

Infectious disease, captive animals, and the Endangered Species Act

There's been a really interesting development in how the Endangered Species Act relates to captive animals in the United States. I picked up on it last fall and spent most of the early part of this year writing a paper about what happened and what implications it might have in the future - but what I didn't expect was to proved right within a month!

Basically, two different lower court judges have ruled recently that exposing captive endangered animals to an increased risk of infectious disease is a violation of the Endangered Species Act. They don’t actually have to get sick - just the fact that the risk wasn’t prevented qualifies. This has super huge implications for zoos and sanctuaries and anywhere else with an endangered species collection. Both lawsuits (one about a lemur, and one about some of the tiger king lions) resulted in major consequences: the lemurs were seized, and since the lions had already been removed prior to that lawsuit, the guy involved got hit with major penalties and prohibitions for the future.

Where I think this potentially creates the most immediate issue is, of course, SARS-CoV-2. Most zoological facilities are ending their requirements for staff to mask and socially distance around susceptible species (and holy heck, I was not aware how many species can get sick from it). This is especially a huge concern for big cats, since they seem to be the most at risk. The ESA lawsuit from 2020, against Jeff Lowe for his treatment of lion cubs, specifically notes that it was a violation for him to not follow “generally accepted” risk mitigation procedures, specifically, not masking and not distancing. So does that mean that zoos and sanctuaries that are having staff stop masking around tigers and lions and snow leopards are violating the ESA? We don’t know for sure, but it’s entirely possible.

The reason we don’t know is that the scope of the ESA is being changed by the interpretation of the courts. Rather than getting amendments passed, or having FWS choose to consider certain things violations, these judges are basically ruling on what they see as a violation of their understanding of the law. And those precedents can have some pretty serious impacts. Other judges aren’t required to rule the same way on similar topics (as long as they’re not in the same district, and a lower court, than the original ruling) but they often take previous precedents on the topic into pretty serious consideration. So for example, the argument that not masking around the lions was based on a precedent from the previous case, where it was ruled that having a lemur living in a situation that made it more likely to get sick was also a violation. So in the next case, courts could choose to agree with the lion and lemur precedents - or not - and we don’t know for sure until it’s litigated. Sigh.

But here’s the thing: there’s plenty of other zoonotic diseases that captive animals have to be protected from. I wrote my paper originally about SARS-CoV-2, but noted at the end that “While SARS-CoV-2 was the zoonotic disease risk during the [lion] court case, it is important to recognize that the ESA violations identified by the courts in that lawsuit and in [the lemur court case] were on the topic of increased or unmitigated disease risk more generally. This new scope of the ESA captive take provision may be relevant to other circulating zoonotic pathogens; for instance, the H5N1 strain of avian influenza has recently proven to be fatal to tigers, mustelids, and some marine mammal species.” I realized after publication that it could be argued that EEHV - the really deadly elephant hemorrhagic herpes virus - might also fall under the scope of these rulings.

And surprise! A couple days ago, it made the news that the Noah’s Ark Animal Sanctuary in Georgia was told to change their practices or be sued for violating the ESA. Some of the allegations? That the facility “failed to prevent tigers and a lion from exposure to the potentially deadly Avian Influenza virus.” I expected to see additional claims in ESA lawsuits about infectious disease risk - I just didn’t expect to see them so quickly after I published a big project warning about the possibility.

I don’t have a sense of where this issue will continue to go from here, as each additional court decisions changes how the precedent might have impacts. But I do think it’s going to be important to pay attention to, and might have pretty big impacts on how facilities handle zoonotic disease moving forwards.

A link to the full 13-page paper on the legal precedents - and my concerns about the impact of ending SARS-CoV-2 precautions around endangered animals - is below.

Sounds like he's having fun! Think about what toy play looks like - it's pretty similar behaviors, much of the time. If treats are super exciting, maybe it's more enjoyable to play with it before eating it and ending the fun time.

I don’t know if I’m late to the party here noticing this, but @staff what the actual hell is this. This is what I get when I click on the link to my own mantis shrimp post, shared on Twitter. I can see the first half, and then I get forced to log-in to keep reading.

I write a free blog on your free platform, and you’re using link sharing on mobile to try to force people to sign up? Not only is this absolutely not okay - this isn’t a paywalled site and my content isn’t subscription only - but it really fucks me over as a science communicator who relies on posts being shared easily to disseminate information.

This is absolutely not okay. I’ve used this site for eight years to do for science outreach and loved it. This choice leaves a really nasty taste in my mouth.

There are more mantis shrimp in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy

Look at this beautiful rainbow buddy. Do you recognize him?

Photo credit: me!

He's a mantis shrimp! Which, thanks to the webcomic The Oatmeal, is a pretty popular species these days. One of the most visceral descriptions in the comic was "sociopathic sea creatures that look like party clowns."

Image credit: The Oatmeal

At this point, if you say "mantis shrimp" to anybody who is even vaguely online, they're probably going to imagine one of these fancy rainbow buddies. Which is accurate, but only partially so! The highly colorful animal pictured in the Oatmeal comic is actually only one species: the aptly named peacock mantis shrimp.

There are actually more than 450 species of mantis shrimp, all in the genus Squilla (A+ name). Some of the species are very drab, but others display an amazing range of colors and patterns. It's just that, of course, the one called a "peacock" gets all the attention because humans are suckers for bright shiny rainbow things.

Take a look at some of the other neat species of mantis shrimp!

Zebra Mantis Shrimp, The Life Aquarist

Chiraga Mantis Shrimp, The Life Aquarist

Leopard Mantis Shrimp, Reef Builders

Blue Spot Mantis Shrimp, Roy Caldwell

Acanthosquilla derijardi, Roy Caldwell

Urchin Mantis Shrimp, Roy Caldwell (feat. that spiky body segment)

Gonodactylaceus falcatus, Roy Caldwell

There are so many cool, beautiful mantis shrimp that I could totally make a "do you love the color of the sky"-length post with just kick-ass photos. Now that we've gloried in their aesthetic diversity, though, let's talk about why these guys are often framed as the murder mittens of the sea.

The American Scientist / Roy Caldwell

Here's a basic mantis shrimp anatomy guide, featuring our peacock friend again. It's basically your typical shrimp body plan, but what we want to look closely at is the "raptorial appendage" and the "dactyl."

Mantis shrimp are known for the fact that they basically punch their food to death - and it's a one hit kill. But they don't use their legs to do it! Mantis shrimp punch with their mouth. Specifically, they use one of their five pairs of mouthparts, called raptorial appendages or raptorial claws. (The other four pairs are used for cleaning and grasping.)

There are two different “types” of mantis shrimp, categorized by the way their raptorial appendage is generally structured: the actual scientific language is "spearers" and "smashers." Spearers are ambush predators that typically hunt from their burrows, and have a long, spiky tip on their appendage which they use to skewer and grab prey like fish; smashers are foragers, and have a much thicker appendage that ends in a club for breaking open hard-shelled animals like mollusks and crustaceans. In the image below, you can see an example of each, with a spear on the left and a club on the right.

Source: The Mantis Shrimp (from an unnamed scientific paper)

Through a very complex physical system, mantis shrimp yeet their appendages at prey or perceived predators with some of the fastest speeds known in biology. In an article for The American Scientist, Dr. Sheila Patek explained that smasher mantis shrimp's raptorial appendages "accelerate like a bullet in a gun (100,000 meters per second squared) and achieve speeds up to 31 meters per second that rival highway traffic moving at 69 miles per hour. The duration is so brief that more than 100 of these strikes could fit within one blink of an eye." Spearer mantis shrimp strike slowly in comparison - y'know, only somewhere between 1-7 meters per second.

How do they strike so fast? The (very) simple-language summary is basically that there's a spring-and-latch system (made of tendons and chitin and other biological bits) within the appendages that stores energy to power their strikes. Mantis shrimp have a special adaptation that lets their muscles generate really strong forces, with the tradeoff that they can't do it very fast. So they don't actively use those muscles to hunt - they use them to create potential energy in the "spring" that is released when they hit. Think of it like a bow: you create the energy to fire an arrow by pulling back on the string. Mantis shrimp do that by engaging both the muscles on the appendage at the same time, which loads energy into the elastic pieces in the "spring" (the exoskeleton of the merus) and retracts the fighting end (dactyl) towards the body. Little scales on the tendons of the smaller muscles "latch" onto the exoskeleton as they move past it, which helps the muscles continue to hold position - sort of like the teeth on a ratchet strap or car jack. When the mantis shrimp wants to hit something, it relaxes both muscles, the "latching" scales disengage from the exoskeleton, and the stored energy releasing from the "spring" makes the appendage shoot forward with incredible speed. The spears get to big stab, and the clubs go smashy-smash.

Anderson et. al, 2014 (smashing on the left, spearing on the right)

But wait, that's not all! There's also incredible physics phenomenon that occurs when things move that fast underwater - it's called "cavitation." Basically, when something moves super fast through a fluid, it forces the bits of fluid right next to it to move really fast, which puts them into a low-pressure state. Liquids at a low pressure state become a gas, so this creates "cavitation bubbles". The water right around the bubbles, though, is still at its original pressure, and it is pushing inwards: so cavitation bubbles almost immediately implode as the water vapor in them turns back into a fluid. The collapse of the bubble releases all the energy that was pushed into the water when it changed state into a gas. It goes bang, generating not only a shock wave but sound, light, and a ton of heat!

Video from O. Supponen et al., gif made by @fuckyeahfluiddynamics The video shows a bubble (black, center) in a fluid imploding and a shock wave emanating out from it in a ring.

So just in case the prey wasn't already dead when it was clubbed by a smasher, it then gets hit by nature's version of a flash-bang. Even if the mantis shrimp didn't manage to hit it, the shock wave and the super-heated water from the collapsing cavitation bubble probably did .* (According to at least one paper I found, spearer strikes don't create cavitation, because they're slower - relatively - than smasher strikes.)

I'm very proud of you for sticking with me through all that! Here's another pretty shrimp as a reinforcer, because... there's more!

Cloridopsis dubia, Roy Caldwell

So all that anatomy and physics stuff is pretty freaking cool, right? What the last couple paragraphs haven't conveyed, thought, is how incredibly powerful those strikes can be. Some of the smasher mantis shrimp can strike with impact forces more than 1000 times their body weight. I was reading one of Patek's papers on the biomechanics of raptorial appendages, and came across this stunner of a sentence:

When the internet says "mantis shrimp can punch hard enough to break aquarium glass", that tells you that they can punch with a lot of force. But there's a difference between "break glass" amounts of force and "crunching through femurs like candy" amounts of force. Smashing mantis shrimp are able to hit faster than stabbing mantis shrimp, but they all generate a ton of acceleration and force relative to how tiny their bodies are.

Earlier, we had a nice, scientific image of what mantis shrimp hunting behaviors look like ... so ... here's the somewhat more nightmare-fuel reality of what a spearing strike looks like irl.

Mantis Shrimp (species unknown) catching a fish. Tetiaroa Society

What I find fascinating is that mantis shrimp can purposely modulate how much force they use, too. Smashing mantis shrimp also spar with each other over mates/territory using their clubs - but they don't kill each other! In part, this is because they aim for the telson (the last segment of the body, kind of looks like a "tail"), which can dissipate a lot of force without being damaged. But it's also a ritualized activity where it's evolutionary detrimental for competitors to kill each other, so they're "pulling their punches" so to speak. Winners actually appear to succeed based on the number of strikes to exhaustion, rather than how hard they can hit or how much damage they do. Here's a video showing documented sparring in a lab at Duke University (sparring starts at 0:53).

Folks, I just love mantis shrimp so much. There's so many incredible things about them. According to one paper, "their capacities to manipulate the environment and respond in subtle ways to their surroundings, and the speed and intensity by which they communicate with each other mark them amongst the “intelligentsia” of crustaceans."

In no particular order, some more neat facts:

Smashing mantis shrimp (a group which includes our buddy the peacock mantis) strike so fast that it outpaces the rate at which neurons can send a signal to and from the brain. Like, literally, they don't have time to adjust their aim or anything - by the time the brain registers it's happening, it's too late! Which means they can't learn how to hunt from real-time feedback, and have to learn from information they can detect before/after a strike instead.

While smashers are the famous shrimp, with their super speed and flashy bubbles, spearers actually comprise the majority of mantis shrimp species. Bigger spearers actually strike more slowly than smaller spearing species, too, and we don't know why yet.

One paper called mantis shrimp sensory systems "a treasure trove of unique and sophisticated adaptations." They have chemoreceptors in addition to an olfactory system, external and internal mechanical receptors that are thought to pick up vibration, and incredibly complex vision. Mantis shrimp can see fluorescence and UV wavelengths and detect polarized light. Most species have at least 12 and sometimes as many as 20 different types of color-sensing cells in their eyes (compared to a human's 3) ... but they're actually worse at color discrimination than we are. Some mantis shrimp appear to be able to recognize specific individuals using chemical cues - it appears to be most common in species that compete heavily for burrows or rely upon pair-bonds.

Mantis shrimp are being studied heavily because of the potential for technologies that use biomimicry. Imaging technology is looking at using structures similar to those found in their eyes to detect a specific type of polarized light; the structure of their smasher clubs is of interest to engineers because of their strength and resistance to cracks.

Okay, that's been a lot about mantis shrimp. Thanks for taking this journey with me. To end, let's circle back to the buddy who inspired the whole post: here's my new favorite peacock mantis photo, courtesy of the Great Barrier Reef foundation. Absolutely intimidating and unsettling and beautiful.

*The Oatmeal comic about mantis shrimp got a couple things wrong, and while I don't want to harp on them for it, it is important to me to address the errors. The statement that contains them is "their limbs move so quickly that the water around them boils in a process known as supercavitation." This is incorrect for two reasons:

Selected Sources:

Snarky answer: funding when?

Actual answer: I'd love to in theory, but spoken media is not my skillset, nor is audio editing. I'd have to hire a whole team to produce it or something. I'm happy to be on other people's podcasts, though! I've done a number of interviews on ZooLogic.