True Facts: The Remarkable Adaptations of Shrimp

this episode sponsored by nordvpn this right here is a tiny little egg and it's just about to hatch oh there it is what emerges is a nlus or the larvae of a shrimp now at this point it doesn't really look like a shrimp does it more like a painful hug but that's because it needs some time to grow as it grows it mols it sheds its outside skeleton and grows a new one and in each mol There's an opportunity to change things up a bit I mean this is a much more radical puberty than getting some hair on

your pits but eventually they get their shrimp together and emerge as a juvenile like all arthropods shrimps are made out of segments and each segment can come with its own pair of sticky ay things or appendages now this can be a fairly straightforward way to build a body ask a centipede head body body body body butt but shrimps which are decapods along with lobsters and crabs had to go and make everything more complicated everything's customized the segments all the way in the back have these

Fanny bits Jerry in the UK that means something different you know potato potato tomato vagina it's all right they can handle it anyway the next set of segments have appendages called swimmer ettes they're quite cute look like they could give a good tickle oh well that's some hotty swimming right there isn't it look at my fancy antenna I mean you better have ended World Hunger if you're going to swim like that that's now the next five segments have pairs of legs on them which is a good thing bec

ause deca c means 10- legged and it'd be a shame to that up it's not always easy to make them out it's a bit of a jumbled mess looks like a man in a trench coat trying to smuggle a bunch of phone cords anyway after that cluster you have three more pairs of appendages up front that help with the eating the two pairs right next to the mouth are often quite small sort of a cross between a mustache and fingers that help cram stuff into their mouth hole but this third pair here is more like a pair of

arms and they can often get quite long and what's at the very end of F will often be modified depending on what they eat you got good old pincers for example they're good for grabbing random crap off the floor and by crap I mean crap or maybe you want to hold on to a fish that you're eating ass first whatever just bring it back to your mustache fingers and Bon Appetit but one of the cool things about living in water is there's food just floating around you you know when you try to catch a snowf

lake on your tongue it's like that but with Rotting Flesh clam sperm and fish feces now some shrimp got wise to that opport unity and they swapped their pincers for whatever those are maybe a floppy Spork or Venus fly hands the bamboo shrimp really went for it just sits back and then schp I mean that's how you lick the Cheetos dust off your fingers right there a bit lazy but no judgment schoom except for the part where I said they were lazy lmom misis benedeni which is an amazing name as a more

active Pig Pen approach instead of waiting for stuff to float by they sort of run in place with their little swimmerets sort of looks like if they didn't hold on they'd shoot forward like in a cartoon anyway this all kicks up a cloud of detritus which is then funneled in the general direction of their mouths oops missed a bit there schl now the Harlequin shrimp wasn't into all this Zippity dooo nonsense and it decided to go for larger prey now first off they do look crazy it's like looking into

the trash after a balloon animal birthday party but if you can figure out what's what you can see that the arm thing they have ends in almost a spatula shape I know what you're thinking oh it's like a spoon finally something appropriate for the soup of the ocean a bit flat but certainly more civilized wrong these are spatulas of death you see Harlequin shrimp are hunters and what they hunt are starfish and those Bes spatula hands are just right for flipping them over like some ornamental pancake

you might make for a picky child look at that that's teamwork right there of course the starfish is like with all the things I have to worry about now I've got a pair of psycho clowns trying to flip my over and you know what the shrimp do when they flip that starfish over yeah they eat their feet and I'm not talking about some fetish thing either like they actually eat their feet because some shrimps are crazy like that I mean look at this one it's eviscerating that fish I bet you didn't know y

our peel and neat Buffet did that sort of thing and it gets worse look at that it takes another fish out of the first fish's stomach should have left it in be like an underwater turducken but there are plenty of shrimp that Foster much healthier relationships this shrimp right here is lismar Andoid NIS it's one of a number of species referred to as cleaner shrimp and you can see that it's comfortable getting into a hole that many creatures would spend a lot of energy trying to stay out of now it

's known that shrimp are delicious so whatever they're doing in there has to be better than eating one from the shrimp's point of view of course they're not cleaning anything they just happen to like eating at a very specific sort of restaurant one that serves up dead skin and parasites and luckily for these cleaner shrimp anyway there's a lot of parasites down there I mean it's a big enough problem that these shrimp even have to go out and find the fish the fish come to them they set up shop so

mewhere and then they do this little dance you know like the people that flip those signs around for a carb wash and it's essentially a way to flag down the Itchy fishes I know what you're saying I wouldn't want a shrimp in my orifice well you probably haven't had leeches I mean look at these poor bastard he's covered in them I don't know if you really need the arrows to point it out but for a shrimp I mean that's like coming across a tray of shoestring potato fries they just wiggle a bit when y

ou bite into them and then you have smaller things like silly ated protozoans that bury themselves right into fish flesh and you know it's satisfying to dig one of those out it's like getting the meat out of a pistachia nut or tongue popping the bean out the pot of a salted edamame you know what I'm saying and listen if you got yourself a case of the parasites you can look a bit ridden hard and put away wet all right fish are always wet but even wetter but look at that after a shrimp takes a tur

n eaten straight from your body you're as good as new listen you might just need something to clean off your parasites I'm talking about those internet parasites you can get from opening up random attachments from your mom or connecting to unsecure networks in the cafe I know what you're thinking bring in the shrimp shrimp well lucky for you nordvpn is like the cleaner shrimp of the internet the VPN part of Nord encrypts your data and sends it through a server in another location you could be Ge

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ith C cucumbers and seem to use them for transportation cuz they're lazy little look at that hanging off the side like it's a Marty Gro float not exactly the express train either but it's it does have a fancy dining cart in spawning season sea cucumbers will let loose their ejaculate into the water as is the custom and the emperor shrimps live out some decadent fantasy of bathing in and eating from a geyser of caviar and of course the benefit for the sea cucumber is it gets to watch a number of

shrimp get into long-term relationships with different sorts of coral and that's cool because Coral can grab food right out the water with their little pop fingers and then the shrimp can just walk over and take it and what's the coral going to do make little fist why are you and sometimes these relationships go on for a very long time and they start finishing each other's sentences and wearing each other's clothes until it's hard to tell them apart you know like Alina hippolyte commens less and

Zenia coral perus and buenus might as well be a choid for choid loud that's a deep dad joke those Harlequin shrimp I bet you are wondering blend intoing nothing because nothing else wants to look like that these squat shrim here don't just stop at looking the part they do a bit of method acting I mean there's see-through ones there's ones that are sort of see-through hippolyte varians comes in two colors each for blending into a different sort of seagrass but each of those has the ability to ch

ange into the other color but blending is sorry but blending in is just one way to get some extra protection perican yucatanicus repeatedly touches the stinging arms of the anemon until it builds up resistance to the poison and after that it's got a a home base that most things aren't keen on getting too close to and of course you can always find yourself a hidey-hole or build one a number of shrimp in the genus alfus shack up with the goby fish the shrimp is in charge of all tunnel related acti

vities building it maintaining it while the GOI which has much better eyesight is on watch Duty sure sometimes having roommates gets a bit awkward sort of a third wheel situation but they've figured out how to make it work but don't start thinking that these shrimps can't fend for themselves in a pinch or snap really you'll see the common names for these shrimps in the family alodine are pistol shrimps or snapping shrimps and to be honest what they can do is somewhere between a shot and a Westsi

de Story snap they have this one enlarged claw with special modifications the top part of the claw has a piece on it that fits into a hollowed out socket on the bottom part using a latch they can build up tension on that joint so much that the skeleton itself deforms and then snap as it Clos a jet of water is forced out of that Hollow through a small opening I know what you're saying I can make water squirt with two cup hands in a swimming pool that's not a defense well it is if you do it really

fast like the whole thing happens in less than 2/3 of a millisecond you see as this jet of water shoots out the water it pushes through creates a swirling pattern almost like a smoke ring they're called Vortex rings for a Teensy moment in the middle of these Rings an area of incredibly low pressure forms in what's called a cavitation bubble it's basically a bubble inside of which there isn't really any liquid water and in an instant the whole thing collapses as water from all sides rushes in to

fill the void this collapse creates a shock wave of high pressure that can stun or even kill another shrimp that shock wave goes in all directions so to protect themselves these shrimp have a sort of helmet there's a layer of water between the outside of their Noggin and their brain when the shock hits water is expelled out buffering some of the blow and it's it's not just for fighting and hunting either they do this snap thing to communicate and it's fraking loud these here are snapping shrimp

in the genus calus I mean look at that big ass claw they live inside sponges and you can see sorry here they make a Ruckus now what's interesting about calus is that they're usocial well that's right Jerry it would be a good name for a social network I mean if they still existed and we weren't sucking off the ubiquitous te of the algorithm sorry these shrimps are usocial like bees and ants with workers and queens and they're the only underwater animal to do that now there's another sort of shri

mp that likes to live in sponges and it's a different kind of sponge too these are glass sponges their skeletons are made from these intricate lates of silica this one right here is called a Venus Flower Basket and the amazing thing is that nearly every single one of these has a male and female shrimp living inside of them look at that you can see one of the claws right there these shrimps swim into the sponge when they're small enough to fit through those little holes but at some point they gro

w too big to get out again apparently there's enough to eat in there and then they get bored and make some babies they leave right cuz they can and then it's just the two of them you know waiting to die I mean it's almost like marriage except well it's like marriage he's like look honey they've come to save us wait don't go if there's only room for one just take me no sorry honey I didn't mean it no we didn't forget mantis shrimp Jerry we're just not doing that well cuz they're not freaking shri

mp they're not even decapods well I know they're called shrimp this one's called the peacock mantis shrimp three things it isn't apparently you can call whatever you want a shrimp look at this they call this a clam shrimp if it was actually those things you'd be halfway to a paa I mean some of the ones we showed aren't even true shrimp but who puts the word true in front of something to add some sort of authority don't get any started on prawns they're shrimp big shrimp British need a different

word for everything it probably means vagina it's true Jerry half the words in the British dictionary mean vagina what do you think cup of tea means that's why they're always on about it nobody could drink that much [Music] tea