Praying Mantises: More Deadly than We Knew
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:
Praying Mantises: More Deadly Than We Knew:
A praying mantis watches intently as a fly bobs by. In less than a blink, she's snatched it up. When the tape is played back in slow motion, we see the mantis pause and calibrate, almost like an experienced baseball catcher who has realized she's dealing with a knuckleball.
It's an impressive highlight reel. As detailed in a paper published this week in Biology Letters, it's also evidence that mantises strike less like automatons and more like active hunters, calibrating their attacks to more efficiently capture their prey as it flies by at different speeds.
[...] The strike of a praying mantis has two phases. In the first, the approach phase, a mantis extends its arms up and outward.In the second, the sweep phase, the mantis scoops the prey out of the air and pulls it in to eat.
Mr. Rossoni and Dr. Niven found that the mantises did indeed adjust their strike speed, according to how quickly the target was moving. Most of that modulation occurred in the approach phase - when presented with a slower target, the mantises would raise their limbs more slowly or pause in the middle, in a zombielike pose.
And if they initially miscalculated the speed of their prey, the mantises would often "correct their own mistakes" with a similar pause, Mr. Rossoni said. "Considering that some of the strikes are less than a tenth of a second, this is quite extraordinary."
It also adds to a growing conversation about what insects - from wasps that can logically infer to ants that can roll down inclines - are capable of.
"Historically, they were viewed more as almost miniature robots that were following very simple sets of rules," Dr. Niven said. "I think that there is new research coming out that suggests that that rule book might be much more complicated."
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.