98 YEARS OLD AND STILL SHAKEN BY SHRIMPS...

RARELY if ever have I been left quaking in fear while conducting a scientific interview but the other day I was so intimidated by my interviewee that I put the phone down, did not respond to any incoming calls, barricaded the windows and doors and hid in the panic room behind the shelves of the Bradypodidae section of my library.

It all began with a paper entitled ” Contests with deadly weapons: telson sparring in mantis shrimp” ( by Patrick Green and Sheila Patek of Duke University, North Carolina) in the September issue of Biology Letters.

It reported the surprising results of experiments to see how mantis shrimps settle territorial disputes.

These sea creatures, which resemble tiny lobsters, pack a ferocious punch. Beneath their bodies they have arms that can unfurl at a phenomenal speed to thump or stab an enemy or prey. They can even shatter the glass of an aquarium with them.

It is a fact almost universally acknowledged, however, that an animal in possession of a terrifying weapon will not in general use it against one of its own species. It would make life too dangerous.

The entire philosophy of nuclear deterrence depends on this, so how do mantis shrimps avoid thumping each other to smithereens whenever they have a disagreement?

To find out the researchers captured a few shrimps and put them in an enclosure which offered an insufficient number of burrows for them to live in. They then put them into pairs, each with a burrow to fight over.

When similar situations occur in the wild with most animals they will square up to each other, flex their muscles and try to look bigger than they are.

Crayfish, for example, will lift the front parts of their bodies and show off their manly chests in a display known as “meral spread”. After a period of this posturing, one of the belligerents will usually be intimiated into backing off without any real fighting.

The researchers expected the same to be true of the shrimps and they did indeed start with the usual displays of strength but then in all but one of the 34 confrontations they set up, the shrimps started throwing punches which tended to land shudderingly but non- fatally on their opponents’ shells.

Intrigued by all this, I innocently put through a phone call to talk to one of the shrimps and asked him why they are so aggressive.

“Who are you calling aggressive?” he demanded.

“The experiments seemed to show that you rarely avoid fighting or seek a peaceful way out of conflict,” I said.

“What of it?” he said. “Your attitude is just typical of you journalists. Do you have any idea of the housing shortage on this estate?”

“I’ve heard of that,” I said, “but you shrimps seem unusually belligerent.”

“Who are you calling a shrimp?” he said, rattling his carapace. “We’re not shrimps, we’re stomatopods. Anyway, this belligerence: d’you wanna step outside and make something of it?”

And that’s when I put the phone down and went to hide.