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This puts the cone snail in fine company, roughly equal to the acceleration with which trap-jaw ants snap their mandibles shut and mantis shrimp strike prey with their smashing arms. It launches with an acceleration equivalent to a bullet fired from a pistol. (Courtesy Joseph Schulz, Occidental College)įrom start to finish, the harpoon’s flight takes less than 200 microseconds. Using high-speed cameras, scientists have been able to document the speed of the cone snail's attack. They had to bump the frame rate all the way up to 58,000 frames per second to fully capture the harpoon’s movement.īy comparison, slow-motion replays in baseball and football games are usually filmed at 500 frames per second, said Toni Lucatorto, a product manager with Vision Research, the company that manufactures the high-speed camera that Schulz and his colleagues use. But it couldn’t match the speed of the cone snail strike. The team started the high-speed filming using a recording speed of 8,000 frames per second. The lighting was so bright that the scientists had to wear sunglasses during the experiments, he added. “We had to pass enough light through the proboscis to highlight the tooth.”
Cone snail harpoon movie#
“It’s not like a movie of a hummingbird wingbeat,” Schulz said. (Courtesy Manuel Jimenez Tenorio, Universidad de Cádiz) Optical micrograph of the barbed, hollow harpoon of Conus bandanus, a cone snail that lives in the Indian Ocean. To record the harpoon-firing process, the researchers had to train the cone snails to extend their proboscis down a heavily illuminated trough and shoot the harpoonlike tooth into a fish-scented membrane at the far end. That allowed the scientists to view the harpoon, which rests within the proboscis, and film its movement. Their hunting appendage - a fleshy, extendable tube called a proboscis - is translucent, like frosted glass. Schulz’s team used cat cones, a small, fish-hunting species of cone snail with shells about 1 to 2 inches long. Joseph Schulz, a biologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles, studies the biomechanics of how cone snails fire their harpoons, and led the efforts to document the phenomenon. It’s not quite as simple as pointing a camera at a snail, however.
![cone snail harpoon cone snail harpoon](https://img.ifunny.co/images/81fd065d35b4b6173ed13a792b49c4d1a3929016759f1859c432d51a2696527a_1.jpg)
Cone snail harpoon full#
Now, using super-high-speed video, researchers have filmed the full flight of the harpoon for the first time. Cone snails launch their harpoons so quickly that scientists were previously unable to capture the movement on camera, making it impossible to calculate just how speedy these snails are. It’s the way they shoot the harpoons that amazes researchers. The sting of some cone snail species, such as this "geography" cone, can be lethal to humans. When they impale their prey, cone snails inject a chemical cocktail that subdues their meal and gives them time to dine at their leisure. They take down fish, worms and other snails using a hollow, harpoonlike tooth that acts like a spear and a hypodermic needle. There are hundreds of species of these normally slow-moving hunters found in oceans across the world. New research shows that cone snails - ocean-dwelling mollusks known for their brightly colored shells - attack their prey faster than almost any member of the animal kingdom.
![cone snail harpoon cone snail harpoon](https://static.newarena.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Cone-Snail-768x510.jpg)
It might be time to rethink the phrase “moving at a snail’s pace.”