Nature gave this shrimp a GUN (but it still needs a BODYGUARD)

[00:00:00]Somewhere on the ocean floor right now, hidden in a burrow it dug itself, there is an animal the size of your finger that is armed not with teeth and not with venom, with a gun. When it attacks, it does not bite and it does not grab.

[00:00:15]It snaps one oversized claw shut so fast that it tears a hole in the water itself and that hole collapses with enough force to knock a fish unconscious from a body length away. The flash it makes is briefly hotter than 4,000 degrees, close to the surface of the sun. The bang is one of the loudest sounds in the entire ocean, loud enough that during World War II it jammed military sonar and helped hide submarines. And here is the part nobody tells you. The deadliest gunslinger in the sea is almost completely blind and [music] it stays alive by hiring a fish as a bodyguard.

[00:00:55]This is the pistol shrimp and it should not be allowed to work this well.

[00:01:00]Let's start with the thing that makes people underestimate it, which is its size. A pistol shrimp is tiny, usually 1 to 2 inches long. You could lose one in a handful of sand. There are over 600 species of them and most look like the kind of thing you would scrape off a rock and never think about again.

[00:01:22]Except for one detail, the claws do not match. One is a normal little shrimp claw used for the boring jobs, eating and cleaning and gathering bits of food off the seabed. The other one is enormous, sometimes half the length of the entire animal. That big claw is not for grabbing. It is the gun and the way it works is so strange that for a long time people thought the sound it made was the two halves of the claw simply clapping together. They were wrong. The clap is not the weapon. The clap is just the trigger.

[00:01:59]Here is what actually happens, and it is worth slowing down for because it is the whole trick. The shrimp the big claw open and locks it the way you would pull back the hammer on a real pistol.

[00:02:13]There is a little plunger on one half and a matching socket on the other. When it releases, that plunger slams into the socket at nearly 100 km an hour, and it forces a jet of water out through a small groove at a speed that water is simply not supposed to move.

[00:02:33]That jet moves so fast that the pressure in front of it drops to almost nothing, and the water does something water normally refuses to do. It boils, not from heat, but from speed. A bubble of vapor forms in the gap, a vacuum pocket where there should be ocean, and that bubble is the actual bullet. For a few hundred millionths of a second, it holds, and then the surrounding ocean crushes it back down. And when it collapses, it releases everything all at once. A shockwave punches outward through the water, and anything small and soft nearby, a worm, a crab, a little fish, takes the full hit and goes limp. The shrimp did not touch it. It shot it with a hole in the water.

[00:03:21]Now for the part that sounds made up.

[00:03:24]When that bubble collapses, the gas trapped inside gets crushed so hard and so fast that no heat can escape, and the temperature inside spikes to somewhere around 4,400° C.

[00:03:39]Some measurements push it closer to 4,700.

[00:03:43]To put that in perspective, the surface of the sun is about 5,500.

[00:03:49]A 2-in shrimp is generating a flash that briefly rivals a star on the floor of a cold ocean on purpose.

[00:03:58]And it really is a flash that collapses so violent that it gives off a tiny burst of light, a phenomenon so specific to this animal that scientists nicknamed it shrimp luminescence.

[00:04:12]The catch is that the flash lasts about 100 nanoseconds and is far too faint and far too fast for any eye to catch. The shrimp fires a gun that produces light, heat, and sound, and it never once sees its own muzzle flash. Then there is the sound. A single [music] snap can reach somewhere around 210 decibels underwater, which makes the pistol shrimp one of the loudest animals in the [music] entire sea, not one of the loudest small animals, one of the loudest, full stop. Trading blows with sperm whales for the title while being roughly the size of a paper clip.

[00:04:55]Which brings us to the strangest chapter in this animal's history, the part where it accidentally went to war. [music] Pistol shrimp do not live alone. They gather in enormous colonies, and a colony of thousands of them snapping all day produces a constant crackling roar across the shallow sea floor. For most of history, nobody cared. Then we invented sonar. During World War II, Navy sonar operators started picking up a wall of noise they could not explain, a static so thick it could swallow the echo of an entire submarine. It took real investigation to discover that the interference was not a malfunction and not the enemy. It was shrimp, millions of them snapping. And once both sides understood that, submarines started doing something clever. They parked over snapping shrimp beds on purpose and let the crackle of a few thousand tiny guns hide the sound of a warship. An animal you could hold in your palm became natural cover for a vessel the length of a football field.

[00:06:04]So, by now you would expect this thing to be the apex tyrant of the seabed. It is not. It has a problem and the problem is hilarious. The pistol shrimp is nearly blind. It carries the fastest gun in the ocean and it can barely see what it is pointing at. So, it makes a deal.

[00:06:23]It teams up with a small fish called a goby. The shrimp is the builder, digging and constantly maintaining a burrow that both of them live in. The goby is the lookout sitting at the entrance with actual working eyes. The shrimp keeps one antenna resting on the goby at all times and the moment the fish flicks an alarm, the shrimp knows a predator is close [music] and bolts for cover.

[00:06:49]Around 130 species of goby pair up with about 20 species of shrimp to run this exact arrangement. Read that back. The most powerful weapon on the seafloor belongs to an animal that needs a seeing-eye fish to use the front door.

[00:07:07]Here is where it stops being a fun fact and starts being useful. That collapsing bubble, the cavitation [music] that powers the whole weapon, is normally something engineers fight against. It is the same process that quietly eats away at boat propellers and pump blades over time. The pistol shrimp does not fight it. It aims it. So, researchers have studied that claw to understand how to [music] control cavitation instead of just suffering it and the same physics has been used [music] to explore everything from generating plasma underwater to ideas for cutting and sterilizing using nothing but a precisely collapsed bubble. A movie even borrowed it in one action film. The rarest superpower a character can get, [music] the one strong enough to be a plot twist, is simply the power of the pistol shrimp.

[00:08:03]Hollywood looked at the entire animal kingdom for the most overpowered ability it could imagine and landed on a real shrimp that already exists. So, that is the pistol shrimp. [music] 1 to 2 in long, nearly blind, protected [music] by a fish, and carrying a weapon that boils water, flashes like a star, and once jammed the navies of the world without ever knowing it did anything at all. It does not roar, it does not chase, and it does not look like much.

[00:08:34]It just waits in its burrow with the safety off and lets the ocean do the rest.

[00:08:40]If you made it this far, do the shrimp a favor and subscribe because next time we are looking at another small animal that broke a rule it had no business breaking. I will see you there.