A thousand or million of these synthetic clubs would generate enough kinetic force to produce electricity; either by steam or mechanical piezoelectric. If duplicated on a nano scale. Would it be energy efficient?

if you have ever been to the seafood restaurants on Hong Kong's Lamma island you'll also know that mantis shrimp grow to the size of a small lobster and are delicious when deep fried.

We can do a similar thing with our finger and thumb. By holding back a finger with our thumb we can 'flick', for example, a marble clear across the room. The finger nail doesn't provide the same protection as the mantis shrimp enjoys, so when someone flicks they don't want to have any air gap between their finger nail and the projectile.

Not an everyday design but it sure is a remarkable species.

How about crash helmets and crash barriers, this could be huge.

100,000 m/s- B. S. That's about 1/3 the speed of light- though relativistic effects wouldn't be significant, the kinetic energy in such a strike (assuming a 1 gm punching claw, though I bet the claw is more massive) would be enormous at 5,000,000 joules!. I suspect they meant to write 100,000x g.

No actually, that's not even close to the speed of light, which happens to be 300,000 kilometres per second. Which would make this 3,000 times slower, in fact. Sorry, but the article's statistics are quite correct.

To those people commenting about 102,000m/s^2, please notice that it is a measure of rate of acceleration. If the animal would keep on accelerating it's club at the same rate for more than the three thousandths of a second that it does, like for a whole second. Then it would reach 102,000m/s (extremely unlikely, especially underwater)

Furthermore, final speed of 50 mph is hardly a speeding bullet.

@grunchy, you have misread the article. it refers to acceleration from 0 to 50 mph in 1/3000s AND underwater....this is VERY impressive