Who Fights With Supercharged Harpoons?
Jellyfish 05/08/2006 Weak, transparent, limp, and drifting in the water who would have thought these creatures possess one of the most powerful weapons in the animal kingdom? Jellyfish and hydras have stinging cells called nematocysts that fire so fast, no one has been able to catch the action of their microscopic harpoons till now. EurekAlert summarized a study being reported in Current Biology1 by a team that photographed them at 1,430,000 frames per second. They calculated the cells discharge in 700 nanoseconds (less than a millionth of a second). The explosive charge is accelerated to 5,410,000 G’s in that brief flicker of time. Even though the weapon weighs a mere billionth of a gram, enough pressure is created in the discharge (15 giga-pascals, the pressure range of some bullets) giving it enough oomph to penetrate even a tough crustacean shell. Cnidarians use these weapons for prey capture and defense. The researchers propose that the high speed of discharge is caused by the rel
