Powerful Mantis Shrimp is Stronger Than an Airplane: New Materials Inspired by Biology (VIDEO)

The mantis shrimp is one of the most unusual and strongest sea creatures in the ocean. This tiny animal can pack a punch, using its fist-like club to stun its prey with speeds that are faster than a 22-calibur bullet. Now, though, scientists have been inspired by the mantis shrimp and have developed a design structure for composite materials that is more impact resistant and tougher than the standard used in airplanes.

"The more we study the club of this tiny crustacean, the more we realize its structure could improve so many things we use every day," said David Kisailus, one of the researchers, in a news release.

The mantis shrimp is a rainbow-colored crustacean that measures a mere four to six inches in length. It possesses a fist-like club that it accelerates underwater to strike its prey. What is interesting, though, is that while this club is under enormous pressures and forces, it doesn't break. In fact, the force created by the impact of the mantis shrimp's club is more than 1,000 times its own weight-so powerful that the mantis has to be kept in a special aquarium so that it doesn't break the glass. In addition, the acceleration of the club is so great that it creates cavitation, which means that it shears the water, literally boiling it as it forms cavitation bubbles that implode. This yields a secondary impact on the mantis shrimp's prey.

So what makes the mantis shrimp's club so strong? The club is composed of several regions, including an endocuticle region. This region is composed of a spiraling arrangement of mineralized fiber layers that act as shock absorbers. Each layer is rotated by a small angle from the layer below to eventually complete a 180-degree rotation.

In this case, the researchers used this spiraled, layered design to create carbon fiber-epoxy composites. These composites could potentially be used in everything from aerospace and automotive frames to body armor and football helmets.

"Biology has an incredible diversity of species, which can provide us new design cues and synthetic routes to the next generation of advanced materials for light-weight automobiles, aircraft and other structural applications," said Kisailus in a news release.

The findings are published in the journal Acta Biomaterialia.

Want to see the mantis shrimp in action? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.