Scenes Inside a Gold Mine, Ch. 9

The Smell and the Hammer.

A.  The T-Shirt test (the Smell) 

44 men are given clean tshirts to wear for two nights.   In the morning, the shirts were collected.  The researchers put each T-shirt in a box equipped with a smelling hole and invite 44 women volunteers to come in, one at a time, to sniff the boxes. The women were instructed to sample the odor of seven boxes and describe each odor as to intensity, pleasantness, and sexiness.

The results confirmed that the women preferred the smells of men with genetically different immune systems than their own.   Specifically, the women selected men with different MHC (major histocompatibility locus) genes.   That choice theoretically provided a survival benefit to their potential offspring because the combination of two different MHC genes  advantage in beating back disease organisms.

Look what's going on inside you
Ooooh that smell
Can't you smell that smell
Ooooh that smell
The smell of evolution surrounds you.

Or so my Uncle Lynard used to say:-)

B.  The Mantis Shrimp (the Hammer)

The Mantis shimp is approximately 30 cm long.   But big things come in small packages.

Mantis shrimp use a hammer-like arm to smash open snail shells for food.  High speed imaging reveal that the hammer can reach maximum speeds from 12-23 m/s (in water).  The hammer strikes in less than 800 µs, with peak forces of 1500 N (over 2500 times the animal’s body weight).

Some larger species of mantis shrimp are capable of breaking through aquarium glass with a single strike from this weapon.

Evolution has given this fiesty crusteacian exoskeletal springs to power the hammer blow.

Though it rules the roost among the clown fish, its hammer is too little and too late against larger prey who find them tasty.

Mantis shrimp is abundant in the coastal regions of south Vietnam, known in Vietnamese as tôm tít or tôm tích. The shrimp can be steamed, boiled, grilled or dried; used with pepper + salt + lime, fish sauce + tamarind or fennel.

In Cantonese cuisine, the mantis shrimp is known as "pissing shrimp"because of their tendency to shoot a jet of water when picked up. After cooking, their flesh is closer to that of lobsters than that of shrimp, and like lobsters, their shells are quite hard and require some pressure to crack. Usually they are deep fried with garlic and chili peppers.

In the Philippines, the mantis shrimp is known as tatampal, hipong-dapa or alupihang-dagat and is cooked and eaten like shrimp.

The supposedly smell wonderful when cooked:-).