When Prof Shane Ahyong was seven, his mum came home with a bag of prawns from the fish shop – but one of those things was not like the others. “It just looked different,” said Ahyong. “It looked a bit like an armoured lobster just without the big claws. I was amazed.” What had caught his eye at his home in Sydney was a mantis shrimp – a crustacean with some of the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom and that (when it’s not dead in a bag of prawns) can strike prey so fast it can be akin to a bullet shooting from a gun. That chance encounter helped spark a career studying marine life – in particular, mantis shrimps and what he calls their “superpowers” of incredible speed and vision. And Ahyong’s latest discovery – a mantis shrimp so unusual it needed its own new genus – has now been named as one of the top 10 most remarkable discoveries of 2024 by the World Register of Marine Species in a list that includes a worm that mimics coral, a carnivorous sponge and a sea star that lives on sunken wood. ‘Definitely a new species’ The story of the newly discovered chimera mantis shrimp – Incertasquilla chimera – started in 2008 when Japanese scientists found a specimen while undertaking marine life surveys off the Ningaloo coast in Western Australia. They sent it to Ahyong – by now becoming a world authority on mantis shrimps – who was working at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. Sign up for the Afternoon Update: Election 2025 email newsletter “As soon as I saw it I thought: it’s definitely a new species – the form of the tail fan and the head – everything was unlike any species I had seen before,” said Ahyong, now the acting chief scientist at the Australian Museum in Sydney. Ahyong’s Japanese scientific colleagues later found the same mantis shrimp living off Iheya Island in Japan. There are several families of the shrimps but Ahyong couldn’t make this new find fit neatly into any of them – despite having discovered about 100 new species of mantis shrimp. “It had features that you could find in three families – it flummoxed me bit. It looked like a mashup of three different families.” The new species is about 9cm long – considered small to medium for mantis shrimps – with “gorgeous” stripes and fake eye-spots on its tail, both features to confuse would-be predators. Some mantis shrimp have blunt clubs as claws that they use to hammer through the shells of clams and snails. Others, like the chimera, have appendages with spines they can flick outwards – unfolding them and striking in as little as four one thousandths of a second, at a speed of up to 8 metres per second, as they spear fast moving prey like small fish. “It unfolds the claw really quickly and it’s slammed into their prey – it’s like a flick knife. But the only way you can see it is with a super slow-motion camera,” said Ahyong. Mantis shrimps also have some of the most complex eyes in the natural world. Each eye has binocular vision, meaning it can judge distances incredibly accurately, and each one can move independently of the other. They also see in a range of light spectra that humans can’t see. ‘Ferraris of the crustacean world’ A couple of years before the rogue mantis turned up in the bag of prawns, Ahyong’s interest in marine invertebrates was sparked with a birthday present from an aunt – a copy of the 1970 book Australian Crustaceans in Colour. “I was the kid that turned over every rock on the beach,” said Ahyong. By the age of 14, he had a mantis shrimp as a pet. He still has one in a tank an aquarium at home but he hasn’t named it. His previous one lived for eight years and was called Lilly, after the wife of his mentor – the late Ray Manning, one of the curators at the Smithsonian Institution. “I never tire of seeing them,” says Ahyong. “Once they get used to you as a diver, they’ll come and touch your hand. But then if prey comes it’s back to work – no mercy. “They’ve a reputation for being a bit brutish. But I think they’re powerful with a great deal of grace and finesse. “They’re like the Ferrari of the crustacean world.”
Author: Graham Readfearn Environment and climate correspondent