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Today we leave the shoreline and go down. Not far. Just far enough for the light to turn blue-green and the coral to start speaking in color. We are looking for a creature that is not a shrimp, and not a mantis, though it borrowed both names. Divers call it the peacock mantis shrimp.

Scientists place it among the stomatopods

It is not large. Most of them would fit in your hand with room to spare—three inches, six, sometimes a little more than seven. Yet the first thing you notice is not size. It is the paint. Greens that look wet even when they are dry in a photograph. Orange legs. Spots on the carapace like a leopard who decided to become a rainbow.

The eyes sit up on stalks, each one a glossy, independent lantern, and they do not move together the way ours do. One can watch the reef. The other can watch you. Stay with the eyes a moment. We will need them later.

A human eye works with three kinds of color receptors—red, green, blue. From those three, the brain mixes the world we know. This little hunter on the sand is given far more. Researchers count about twelve channels for color alone, and still more for polarized light—they twist and shimmer in a wave that our eyes cannot read at all. Some of those channels reach down into ultraviolet, a country of light we walk through every day without seeing it. Each eye is divided into three bands, so the creature can judge depth with a single eye. You and I need two eyes working as a team to know how far the coffee cup is. This animal can do it looking sideways.

What does that mean on a living reef?

It means the world in front of this creature is not the world in front of us. The same coral that looks merely pretty to a snorkeler is, to the mantis shrimp, a map written in colors and polarizations we have no names for. Prey that thinks it is camouflaged may be easily spotted by the mantis shrimp. A shell that looks dull to us may flash bright to the mantis shrimp.

God did not give this animal “better decorations.” He gave it a different room in the house of light.

Now look lower.

Folded under the body are two heavy forelimbs. In some stomatopods those limbs end in a spear. In the peacock, they end in a club. Divers who have been nipped call the animal a thumb-splitter, and they are not joking. The club is not muscle swinging wild. It is a spring. A saddle of elastic tissue stores energy the way a drawn bow stores energy. A latch holds it. When the latch lets go, the club is thrown forward through water—water, which is nearly eight hundred times denser than air—at speeds on the order of fifty miles an hour. The acceleration has been compared to a small-caliber bullet leaving a barrel. The whole event is over before you can blink. High-speed cameras have to race to catch it.

And that is only the first blow.

The club moves so violently that the water behind it cannot keep up. A tiny cavity opens—a bubble of near-nothing. Then the ocean slams that bubble shut. The collapse is called cavitation—. It sends a second shock into the prey. Sometimes there is even a brief flash of light in the collapse. The snail or crab is hit twice: once by the club God created, and once by the water God made.

Aquarium keepers learned this the expensive way. Glass that holds ordinary fish does not always hold a peacock mantis shrimp. The same blow that splits a snail’s shell can crack aquarium glass—sometimes leaving a star-shaped fracture that starts as a tiny chip and then spreads.

So here is the picture, held still for a moment.

A creature the length of a butter knife. Eyes that drink in more of the spectrum than we can imagine. A spring-loaded blow so sudden it makes the water itself strike. Beauty that looks like celebration. Force that looks like judgment. Both in one body, living in a U-shaped burrow at the edge of a reef.

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