A snap in the ocean is briefly as hot as the sun
The pistol shrimp’s claw collapses a cavitation bubble that reaches about 5,000 K and emits a flash and a crack louder than a gunshot.
Established2 min read
One claw has a plunger and a socket. The plunger drives a jet, the jet leaves a low-pressure wake, and the wake becomes a bubble that implodes. Versluis and colleagues filmed it at tens of thousands of frames a second and matched the light and the sound to the collapse.
The temperature estimate, around 5,000 K, is the surface of the sun’s order, for a fraction of a microsecond, in a volume smaller than a pinhead. The prey is stunned by the shock. Colonies of these shrimp are a major source of underwater noise in warm shallow seas.
Caveats
- It is not a sustained temperature and not the solar core. It is a transient in the bubble.
- Decibel comparisons between water and air need care. The source level is genuinely extreme.
Sources
- 1Versluis M., Schmitz B., von der Heydt A., Lohse D.. How Snapping Shrimp Snap: Through Cavitating Bubbles. Science 289, 2000.