And mantis shrimp are officially the fastest measured feeding strike of any animal system. So our first surprise.

And mantis shrimp are called mantis shrimp after the praying mantises, which also have a fast feeding appendage. And I started to think, well, maybe it will be interesting, while listening to their sounds, to figure out how these animals generate very fast feeding strikes.

Conversely, in the RPG Kingdom of Loathing , prawn , referring to a kind of crustacean, is spelled pr0n , leading to the creation of food items such as pr0n chow mein .

Now, this is pattern thinking. That praying mantis is made from a single sheet of paper no scotch tape, no cuts.

So this is a mantis shrimp. There are the eyes up here, and there's that raptorial appendage, and there's the heel.

And if folding a single praying mantis from a single uncut square wasn't interesting enough, then you could do two praying mantises from a single uncut square.

So this is a potent force in fluid systems, and just to sort of take it one step further, I'm going to show you the mantis shrimp approaching the snail.

Biologist Sheila Patek talks about her work measuring the feeding strike of the mantis shrimp, one of the fastest movements in the animal world, using video cameras recording at 20,000 frames per second.

So, a quick strike like that. And if we slow it down a bit, this is the mantis shrimp the same species recorded at 1,000 frames a second, played back at 15 frames per second.

And if any of you ever have a chance, backstage of the National Museum of Natural History is one of the world's best collections of preserved mantis shrimp. And what this is serious business for me.

So, this what I saw, on every single mantis shrimp limb, whether it's a spearer or a smasher, is a beautiful saddle shaped structure right on the top surface of the limb. And you can see it right here.