Imagine for a second that you’re a crab, and a fellow crustacean called a mantis shrimp has decided to make you its lunch. The truth is, it’s not worth struggling. The mantis shrimp uses muscles to cock back two hammer-like appendages under its face, storing energy in a saddle-like divot in the limbs. When it releases the latch, the hammers accelerate so quickly, and strike your shell with such brutality, that they produce cavitation bubbles in the water, which collapse and release a secondary shockwave that knocks you out cold. (If you had decided to put up a fight, the mantis shrimp would have strategically blown off your claws first, then punched you in the face until you died.)

That’s a lot to unpack, and no one knows the struggle better than scientists. For years, they’ve been using high-speed photography to figure out how a little crustacean can manage what is perhaps the most powerful pound-for-pound punch in the animal kingdom—and in the significant extra drag of water, no less. A big key, researchers report today in the journal iScience, is not only the shape of that energy-storing saddle, but its clever material composition. Now the engineering that’s made the mantis shrimp one of the most ferocious killers in the sea could make its way into robots—ideally not of the ferocious killer variety.

Maryam Tadayon/Nanyang Technological University

The researchers began by investigating the saddle of a mantis shrimp (which is not actually a shrimp, by the way, but a stomatopod) with a technique called nanoindentation. “Basically, you can probe the mechanics at a very small scale,” says coauthor Ali Miserez, a professor who studies bioinspired engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “You use a diamond tip and you push on the materials.”

What Miserez and his colleagues found was equal parts strange and evolutionarily brilliant. The saddle is made up of distinct top and bottom layers: On top is a bioceramic, not unlike what you’d find in a coffee mug, while on the bottom is a stretchy material called a biopolymer.

When you’re in the walloping business, a ceramic might not come to mind as your sturdy material of choice. “We all have the impression that ceramics are brittle,” says Miserez. “If I drop my coffee cup on the floor it would probably shatter. But actually it's brittle mainly in tension, when you pull on it. But if you compress a ceramic it's pretty strong.”