Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/03/this-odd-animal-has-one-of-the.html
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So its still really fast, but according to Scientific American its 6 milliseconds, not 1/6 millseconds.
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Exactly what I was thinking.
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Fizgig just doesn’t get enough love.
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Too fast for slow-motion video, eh?
https://petapixel.com/2018/10/15/the-worlds-fastest-camera-can-shoot-10-trillion-frames-per-second/
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Yes. This.
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Fastest bite? They have not seen my mother-in-law at a buffet.
- totally appropriate humor in 1956
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Fishy hair-frog > froggy hairfish > hairy fish-frog > fishy frog hair > hairy frogfish > froggy fish hair.
Fight me!
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So the prey travels maybe 8 centimeters in 6 milliseconds? That’s basically 0 m/s to 13 m/s in 0.006 s. I’m no physicist, but a linear g-load calculator website puts that at about 226 G’s.
So basically the prey is not only captured, but is liquified in the process.
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What a creature!
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Fast food in the giant restaurant called nature.
Apparently not, you can see this prey item retained its shape:
Their mouthparts extend a long way forwards during the bite, so the prey item doesn’t really move that far during the 6ms of the mouth closing. You can see this if you skip frame-by-frame in the video- the frogfish’s head seems to double in length (and engulf the smaller fish) in a single frame, then retracts somewhat more slowly as it swallows it.
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Vacuum is technically correct - vacuum being a matter of relative pressure differential rather than absolute emptiness - but may be a misleading choice of words. My guess is that the process is more specifically cavitation.
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Could Jonesy pick it up on his headphones?
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That was one of the movies that got me interested in acoustics, fluid dynamics and ultimately nonlinear dynamics in general in undergrad.
Given Clancy’s fondness for Cold War tech, I’m guessing he partially based the caterpillar drive off real world attempts at supercavitation vehicles.
Take this next one with a grain of salt. Supercavitation submarines capable of exceeding the speed of sound waves (whether as measured in air or water) are kind of like controlled break-even fusion, theoretically possible but prohibitively expensive to develop…
[Mostly posting all this for general consumption. Given that you regularly post similar candy, I’d be unsurprised if you know more about cavitation tech than I do. 
]
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Nah, I’m just a civil engineer who reads a lot. And knows his Clancy.
Cavitation does come up in civil engineering, but I just learned the basics at uni and never really worked in fields where you’d need it. Did some courses that also covered fluid dynamics though, but just for the fun of it.
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Booshwah, my bird can strike faster than this, and footpunch an overcaffeined mantis shrimp on the way out, and no one would see anything but the red, coagulating result…
I read this in the voice of Don Rickles.
“Fastest bite? They have not seen my mother-in-law at a buffet. An attendant was switching out a tray of rice pudding and lost two fingers!”
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