- [Dr. Sheila] So what we're seeing in this lab are movements and capabilities that are completely invisible to the naked eye.

When we are using these high-speed video cameras, we're often filming at 30,000, 300,000 frames per second, and sometimes only getting like five or six frames of the movements themselves.

We study the invisible, we study what was previously thought was impossible and our first step, in even discovering these things, is just to film them.

- [Frank] Video magic makes the invisible, visible.

- [Jacob] We often choose to film anywhere between 20,000 to 300,000 frames per second, depending on the biological system.

Right?

And what we're looking for is to have enough frames per second to fully capture the movement and then be able to track how that motion changes in its own environment.

And then from there, we can ask really interesting questions about how fast these motions are going?

What is the energetics required to produce this type of movement, given that be in air or in water?

- [Frank] And suddenly nature's wonders are even more all inspiring.

- In a lot of these cases, we don't understand why why do the animals need to move this way?

And that's really where a lot of our research focuses is at that basic level of understanding questions of how and why these animals do what they do.

- These organisms are just playing with the craziest extremes that physics presents us.

- [Frank] Take the snapping shrimp with its giant claw.

- [Jason] And what we just did was glue a toothpick onto its back.

You can leave the toothpick on and it'll melt it off and be perfectly fine.

And that's a way for us to keep it still in this really large tank that we're about to put it in.

One of the things about these high-speed cameras is that you have a pretty small frame of the image and so you want to make sure your animal is in the frame and the angles are right.

So what we're interested in is capturing the motion and also capturing the sound.

And so the camera is going to capture the motion and we have this hydrophone here that we're going to put in and it's going to capture the sound and then we're going to induce it to snap.

They're pretty angry, little animals so they're not that difficult to get to snap.

Basically, if you wave anything in front of its face, it'll snap at you.

So they'll do it for defense predators that might be coming in trying to eat them.

They'll also do it fighting each other.

So they'll compete over mates.

They'll compete over boroughs.

- [Frank] Now, watch and listen.

[shrimp's claw snap] The hydrophone records the snap, but what the high-speed camera captures is truly amazing.

I got to admit, you could see the claw, but, but that water jet and all that, or whatever that is, that is what is that?

That is cool.

- It's very cool.

So for a long time, people had had no idea there was this water jet bubble forming.

And what it is is that if you look on the top of the claw, there's this little tooth, it kind of sticks down and around, and right on the bottom of the claw there's a hole that it fits into.

And so when the shrimp closes, it's a claw really fast, basically what it does is shoot out this jet of water and that moves at incredibly high velocities.

It actually moves so fast that it drops the pressure behind the water to the point that it turns to water vapor.

It's literally boiling it.

It's moving so fast.

And so what that bubble is, is actually a little bubble of water vapor.

That's sitting inside a tank of actual water, and that makes this collapse called the cavitation bubble.

And that's what you're hearing when you hear these sounds.

- Can he aim it?

- Yeah, they can aim it.

And in really highly escalated fights they'll actually shoot these bubbles at each other.

So you'll see them facing each other and they'll actually fire these super intense cavitation bubbles at each other.

So before we were actually able to film this at thousands of frames every single second people thought that sound was just the claw snapping against itself and no one knew that this bubble actually existed.

- [Frank] Remember that sound is the cavitation bubble exploding.

And, until now, the bubble created by the high-speed jet of water was invisible.

So what do you think is you're looking at that?

- How in the world, natural selection and evolution make a system for tiny little shrimp to literally boil water when they're fighting each other.

- [Frank] It's a violent intersection of material science, physical science, stored energy, acceleration, and fluid dynamics, all mastered by a tiny crustacean.

- [Dr. Sheila] How you put those together to do these extraordinary things?

We don't know.

Biology, there's so many pieces where we have no idea.

And to me that's just absolutely thrilling.

You know?

That there's so many things really yeah don't know how that one works.

Let's go try to figure it out.

- [Frank] You couldn call the tiny critters photographed by the lab, the superheroes of the natural world.

- [Ben] And I think it's a really interesting question of why did it evolve this way and why is evolution selecting for this?

Or maybe it's not selecting and it's just totally random.

- So I've spent actually much of my career grappling with that question.

Is this important?

And so I really have a bunch of answers to that.

One is this piece that I think most people immediately grasp onto, which is we could build better devices.

If you discover a hammer, a biological hammer, like many shrimp have that can break through a shell, that's considered like one of the hardest to break materials ever, then you can build lightweight fractures as a materials.

They exist now on the market, completely from the discoveries that we made from a disrupt.

I think that that, that makes a lot of logical sense.

Okay, we're studying these now we have better products.

I think on the other, the other end of the spectrum, there is massive inherent value in new knowledge.

What do we know?

What is the scope of what we even know.

- [Voiceover)} Thanks y'all for watching this video and if you want more where that came from, check out our channel, SciNC.

Stick around!