Let's play a game called "fists or spears?" Just put your hands in front of him to play.
Let's get this out of the way: if "jumbo shrimp" is an oxymoron, this thing is an oxy-dumbest-person-on-the-planet. This gargantuan crustacean was caught Florida, a.k.a. America's Australia, which attracts almost as many crazy creatures as crazy people. Now, before we go any further, I really need you to know why this beast is so terrifying: scientists believe it's a mantis shrimp, which are some of the most vicious little shelled creatures on the seafloor. Here's a short and amusing clip that should explain it (I've queued it up to the part about how killer they are):
So, they come in two varieties, ones that punch their prey to death with the most powerful jab, pound for pound, in the animal kingdom, and ones that stab their prey to death with horrifying spearfists. The punching kind have been known to break the glass on their aquariums. The ones in the video were, at most, the length of a person's hand. The ones in these pictures, as you can see, have hands that are as long as a person's hands. It probably couldn't kill you, but it could likely give you a black eye, or, you know, stab you in the face. Scaled up from the mantis shrimps in that video, that would hurt a lot more than being pinched by a lobster. After fisherman Steve Bargeron caught this monster, in Fort Pierce, FL, he sent the pictures to the Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission, who promptly posted the freak on their Facebook page.
I hope science discovers more about this giant specimen, whether it's just representative of how big mantis shrimp can get (lobsters grow forever and are biologically immortal), or whether it's a new species of this terrifying power, hopefully one with the special ability to not kill everything it touches.
(by Johnny McNulty)