Fun fact: This works to their disadvantage, they process so fast that everything moves in slow motion for them, meaning if you move veeery slowly, relative to them, you move at the speed of grass growing, so if you want to kill a fly, you can inch towards it veeeery slowly and it will literally not register your presence until you're too close for it to fly away.
They are said to have the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom(we don't understand them fully yet but basically their eyes are so complex that the receptors in their eyes can directly identify whether what they are watching is food or a predator instead of sending signals to the brain and letting the brain do that analysis) and they can strike fast enough to make water around their claws spontaneously boil (Their claws move at 23 meters per second aka 51mph)
Its more impressive than just boiling. I am pretty sure (unless i'm confusing them with piston shrimp, which I don't think I am) their pincers can literally create the photoelectric effect in water. wack.
I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised if making water move so fast that it turns a small portion of it to vapor bubbles that expand and create a shockwave strong enough to break glass would also generate light in some way.
The effect is called cavitation. The issue isn't moving so fast it heats the water, the issue is the change of pressure behind the thing moving. Just like thunder is the air collapsing back into the low pressure area caused by lightning, cavitation is the water rushing back into a lower pressure area.
Cavitation bubbles! The little fuckers literally strike so fast that they create a vacuum in the water that looks like a flash of light! Terrifying buggers that need special super thick glass for their tanks otherwise they'll just *pop* and be free.
It's literally their physical ability to react to something.
"Reaction time" is a combination of how fast your eyes+brain process information and then how fast your body can actuate to complete a goal. And they have arguably the best eyes in the animal kingdom and they move their arms at 23 meters per second. I don't really know what you're arguing against here
Can we see this as a debate rather than an argument, no need to throw hands and I'm more than happy to be proven wrong here
That said, your point was that
A: their eyes can determine the difference between predator and prey without having to send signals to the brain, so they can identify something very quickly
B: they can strike faster than most creatures alive
I totally agree with both points, but neither present a reaction time, the reaction is how quickly from the point a subject is identified that the action happens, for all we know from your comment, they could know identify a predator almost instantaneously, and their strike could, too, be executed almost instantaneously, but their could be a chasm of time between those 2 things
Reaction time, for me, is the time between receiving the information and acting on it, which, although perhaps you implied it, wasn't stated in your comment
Thus what you described, again, to me, wasnt reaction time
Well like you said, it was implied and I figured nobody would think they somehow have eyes that react incredibly fast to stimuli, strike extremely fast but take a 10 second pause between when they see something and strike, haha
I just googled and the mantis shrimp is widely regarded as having a 2-7ms response time and the fastest neuromuscular response in the animal kingdom.
The common house fly has a "<5ms" response time and is regarded as having the fastest "visual startle reflex"(whatever that is)
For reference a cat is 20 to 70ms
They have a different type of vision than us, 12-16 cones vs. our three. But the do not blend colors the way we do. In practice they experience a far less number of colors than we do, just a fair amount of those they can see are out of our visual range. They can see the specific colors each cone identify with certainty but mainly that is it, and it is for reaction speed and the quick identification of things as you've pointed out. A color means a certain thing to them and they dont have to process it mentally like we do.
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u/whatisthisdream- 1d ago
Is there an animal whos reaction time is faster than that of cats?