Cone snail harpoon speed8/8/2023 ![]() These mollusks can lance their prey in a fraction of a second, instantaneously incapacitating even the speediest fish their cavernous mouths can balloon to chasmic widths and swallow their doomed targets whole. Their venoms make their modus operandi possible, and in recent years, researchers have made big strides in identifying several of these chemical cocktails’ most intriguing ingredients. Some are straightforward paralytics released from a hooked tooth held at the proboscis’s end, which certain snails will launch like a harpoon at hapless fish. First, a fast-acting bolus of toxins temporarily freezes the fish a second wave induces irreversible paralysis. The snail can then slowly reel its immobilized dinner into its billowing mouth. Baldomero “Toto” Olivera, a biochemist at the University of Utah who’s been spying on these snails for the past five decades, calls this the “taser and tether” tactic. It works best near coral reefs, where snails can sometimes ambush unsuspecting fish up to twice their size. “They can’t even get back into their shell when they harpoon a fish that big,” Olivera told me. A couple hours later, after the snail has liquefied the soft parts of its grub, it will belch the scales and bones back out. “You’ll find a ball of all the hard parts,” Olivera said. Other snails, such as the geographer cone snail, hunt schools of fish that are snoozing out in the open. These creepers douse their prey in a concentrated cloud of benumbing chemicals that Olivera delightfully calls the “ nirvana cabal.” Among the ingredients is insulin, the same hormone humans, fish, and many other animals make to keep their blood-sugar levels in check. The chemical seeps in through the fish’s gills and floods their bloodstream, triggering hypoglycemia and leaving them disoriented and defenseless. The fish “have no energy to swim away,” Olivera said. “It’s like they’re in an opium den.” The victorious snail then deploys its enormous mouth like a net to engulf the comatose fish one by one. The fish are so zonked that they look “hypnotized, like they don’t even see the predator,” says Joshua Torres, a biochemist at the University of Copenhagen who studies cone snails. That might mean some fish “don’t even know what’s happening to them,” Helena Safavi-Hemami, Torres’s postdoctoral adviser, told me. Paralyzed fish of the tased variety are probably less blissfully unaware. "We are continuing to work on the species, and are following up on potential reasons for such extraordinary speeds.“I think it’s painful,” Safavi-Hemami said. "We are still somewhat puzzled by the fact that cone snails are so darn fast despite the fact that their prey are two orders of magnitude slower," says Professor Azizi. These extreme speeds are similar to a fired bullet. Using high- speed videography, the researchers determined that the radular harpoon can be propelled into prey within 100 microseconds, with a peak acceleration exceeding 280,000 m/s2 and a maximal acceleration exceeding 400,000 m/s 2. Scientists believe that the high speed of the movement is necessary to deliver the venom quick enough to exceed the escape time of potential prey, which include fast swimming fish. ![]() When searching for food, cone snails use their radula as a projectile and conduit for the delivery of powerful venom. By evaluating the anatomy and functional limits of these structures, we hope to uncover insights into how they evolve and how their design could inspire new forms for robots or medical devices," said Professor Azizi. "When studying movement in animals, we found that latch and muscular sphincter structures like the one found in the cone snail's hydraulically propelled radula are capable of producing movements at remarkable speeds. And Professor Azizi and his colleagues were interested in determining just how fast their harpooning radula could function. catus use their chitinous radula to catch fast moving fish and other marine animals with remarkable speed. While many land snails use their radula, or feeding structure, to munch on plants, members of C. catus have been found to possess some of the quickest movement among the animal kingdom. Most people may not equate snails with speed, but members of the aquatic species C.
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