Hello and welcome to today’s Daily Fun Fact From Flora

We are going to take a little look at muscles and how they can achieve some pretty remarkable things that you wouldn’t necessarily think they could.

Let’s take our first example of clicking. Most people can click their fingers (sorry to rub it in if you can’t). It’s pretty cool.

But have you ever thought about why you can click your fingers. If you try and create the same effect by just tapping your hand with your fingers you can’t get anywhere near enough power to generate a loud noise.

SO what is happening here?

Well muscles are pretty awesome because they can be used as what is known as a power amplifier. The muscle acts as a store of elastic energy. You can build this energy up slowly as you start to press down on your thumb and then BAM.

You suddenly unload the forceand it results in a movement that is way faster than you could ever get with muscle power alone.

Think of a bow and arrow. You could never chuck an arrow at the speed that they fly through the air, instead you slowly pull back the string (is it called a string ? I bet there’s a fancy name I don’t know about) and then suddenly release it and PHWOAR the arrow goes flying.

Or at least that’s what is supposed to happen. When I try it looks a bit more like this

Now this use of muscles as a power amplifier can be seen across the animal kingdom and I"m gonna show you two pretty epic examples.

NUMERO UNO

Horse biceps act as an elastic energy store. While the horse is standing the muscle is passively stretched and this builds up energy. That means the leg can then be catapulted forwards when the horse runs.

Therefore, the horse can accelerate at crazy speeds. In fact the horse bicep would need to be 50kg (FIFTY BRO WHAT EVEN) to get that fast by muscle power alone. The bicep actually 0.4kg. NUTS. That is super important because it allows the horse to be light and rapid in its running.

NUMERO DOS

Now the mantis shrimp is one of my all-time favourite animals. If you haven’t seen one before they look like this.

Psychedelic looking bastards I know.

Now they are predators and they live in burrows. They wait and they wait and they wait until their prey is in striking distance and then WHABAM.

They “punch” the prey SO FAST. Like SO FAST. Like accelerating faster than a .22 calibre bullet kind of fast. When they collide with the prey they deliver 160 lbs of force.

In fact if you could throw a ball at 1/10 of the speed that these shrimp punch their prey — it would go into orbit.

WHAT THE FUCK.

Anyways these guys are also reliant on the wonderfully elastic properties of their muscles. The “hammer” they use for punching (known much more badassly as the raptorial appendage ) has a large muscle that pulls the hammer back.

This compresses their exoskeleton. They then effectively put a latch on this muscle and just wait. When the prey comes by they can flick the latch and rapidly release all of that energy.

This is an (obviously) very slowed down version.

COOL, EH?

So — in conclusion — when you click your fingers you are basically a mantis shrimp.

Noice.

Lots of love,

Flora