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When a mantis shrimp fights a disco clam
(suppo.fi)
xD this is great, what is this?😂
It's from IT part 2. Bill Hader's character is going to throw a rock at IT, but gets mesmerized by the Deadlights.
Weird, I was just at an aquarium yesterday and spent a good amount of time being fascinated by both the mantis shrimp and the flame scallops and now here this post is. That phenomenon has a name doesn't it?
It's called the baader-meinhoff effect, which you'll be reading about elsewhere tomorrow.
I call that effect "baader-meinception"
Haha appreciate it. I'm sure you're right and I'll see it again soon
The relevant Oatmeal comic:
Which we now know to be incorrect, because apparently mantis shrimp don't perceive combined colors from those receptors, but only the sixteen discrete colors. This seems to make their vision faster by saving on some brain processing, but what they see is like a gif with a palette of sixteen colors.
Life in Compuserve.
Now you're getting it.
Thanks for introducing me to this comic
Don't mantis shrimp have a ridiculous number of colour receptors? My guess would be there's something going on with the clam's reflective tissue that we can't see.
Despite their 12 photoreceptors, mantis shrimps are worse at telling apart different colours than humans, honeybees and butterflies.
We see colours by making comparisons between our three receptors. By comparing the outputs of the red and green receptors, we can tell the difference between reds and greens. And by comparing their combined output against that of the blue receptors, we can discriminate between blues and yellows. This is called the “colour opponent process” and it’s what every colour-sighted animal does.
Their working hypothesis is that the mantis shrimps analyse the outputs from all of their 12 receptors at once. Rather than making comparisons between those receptors, they pass the entire pattern of outputs onto the brain, without any processing.
Marshall suggests that this way of dealing with colour should be much faster than ours, since there is no need to send the photoreceptors’ signals through any intermediary neurons.
And they only have a small brain. “A mantis shrimp only has a fraction of our cortical processing power, yet it handles 4 times more input,” says Nicholas Roberts from the University of Bristol.
tl;dr: It's my hypothesis that the clam overloads the stomatopod's tiny brain with a massive amount of input.
Soo, this is the exploit of a neuronal bug? Bugfix when?
You'll have to wait for the genetic algorithm to finish; they are not known to be the fastest
But the mantis shrimp appears to have met its match in the disco clam, a bivalve whose name I didn't just make up. When the predator faces this prey, the clam simply opens up its shell to reveal a brilliant ribbon of flashing light. If the mantis shrimp keeps up the attack, it'll go catatonic for up to 15 minutes. The disco clam is saved, and the mantis shrimp is not only out of a meal but is itself at risk of being eaten, by hanging out there like a punch-drunk prizefighter.
During the fight Bee Gee’s music could be heard.
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
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