Three Animals

The wandering albatross has the widest wings of any living bird: a mean of 3.1 m at South Georgia, a typical range of 2.5 to 3.5, and one 1965 record of 3.63 m on a bird caught by a research ship in the Tasman Sea, at a body mass of roughly six to twelve kilograms^[1][2]. The wings are not for flapping. In 2012 Gottfried Sachs’s group fitted twenty birds at Kerguelen with GPS loggers sampling ten times a second and reconstructed what the bird does with the wind: it climbs out of a wave trough into faster air, turns downwind, dives back into the slow air near the surface, and arrives with more energy than it left with, around a 360 percent gain per cycle, airspeed swinging from about 10 to nearly 30 m/s, altitude from zero to 15 m, each cycle about fifteen seconds^[3]. Philip Richardson’s analysis put the wind-shear contribution at 80 to 90 percent of the energy needed for sustained soaring, with a minimum wind of about seven knots and a tack of about 30 degrees, like a sailboat^[4].

The cost of all this is almost nothing. Henri Weimerskirch’s group logged heart rate on free-flying birds and found that with favourable tail or side winds they “can achieve high flight speeds while expending little more energy than birds resting on land”; the effort is greatest taking off and landing, not flying^[5]. The anatomy that allows it is a tendinous sheet running the length of the deep pectoralis that passively locks the wing horizontal, a “shoulder lock,” so that holding the wings out costs no muscle at all^[6]. The first satellite tracks of any bird, in 1990, showed wanderers covering 3,600 to 15,000 km in a single foraging trip while a mate sat on the egg, at up to 900 km a day^[7]. The fastest circumnavigation on record belongs to a cousin: a grey-headed albatross went round the Southern Ocean in 46 days^[8].

Albatrosses live long enough to make the arithmetic strange. A Laysan albatross on Midway Atoll was banded in 1956 by the biologist Chandler Robbins; she was already an adult, so at least five. Robbins found the same band again in 2002. She was named Wisdom in 2006, had worn out five bands and raised at least thirty chicks by 2013, was “at least 71” by the Fish and Wildlife Service’s count in 2022, and in December 2024, after her long-time mate had been absent for two seasons, laid an egg with a new male at an estimated 74; it hatched on 30 January 2025. She came back in the 2025–26 season and did not lay^[9][10][11]. Every number attached to her is a minimum.

Albatrosses pair for life, mostly. In a sixteen-year study of black-browed albatrosses on New Island in the Falklands, about 15,500 pairs, Francesco Ventura’s group found the divorce rate varied from 1 to 8 percent a year and rose in years with warm sea-surface anomalies, and that the warmth raised the chance of a female leaving a male she had bred successfully with. Ventura’s reading is partner-blaming: a stressed female concludes the male is underperforming^[12]. The one claim I could not support is the famous one. Sleep in flight has been proven by EEG in exactly one group, great frigatebirds, which over flights of up to ten days slept 0.69 hours a day, less than a tenth of what they sleep on land, mostly while circling in thermals^[13]. No one has put electrodes on a flying albatross. What the tracks show is a bird that spends about sixty percent of its foraging time sitting on the water^[14]. Sleeping on the wing is plausible by analogy and undemonstrated in fact, and that is how I will say it.

There are about 2,400 species of mantis^[15]. The head turns nearly 180 degrees, which is unusual among insects; the popular “only insect that can” is a magazine line with no paper behind it^[16]. The paper that matters is from Newcastle. In 2016 Vivek Nityananda and Jenny Read glued tiny 3D glasses to mantises with beeswax, one lens blue and one green since red is invisible to them, and showed them bugs on a screen; the insects struck at the ones rendered to float in front of the screen and ignored the flat ones, “definitively” demonstrating stereo vision in an insect^[17]. Then in 2018 they found it is not our stereo. Mantises can judge depth in images that have no matching features between the two eyes at all; what they compare is change over time in each eye, not the pictures. “This is a completely new form of 3D vision,” Nityananda said, “based on change over time instead of static images”^[18]. A robot built on it would need a fraction of the computation ours do.

It also has one ear, in the middle of its chest between the hind legs, tuned to 25 to 45 kHz, which is where bats echolocate. David Yager and Ronald Hoy found it in 1986 and watched some species dive abruptly out of a flight path when played ultrasound; a single ear cannot tell direction, so the mantis simply drops^[19]. The strike is fast but not the way it is described. High-speed video of the Madagascan marbled mantis puts the raptorial strike at 60 to 290 milliseconds, and the insect slows it for slower prey, adding a pause mid-extension; the oft-quoted “microseconds” is off by a thousand^[20].

The cannibalism is real and less common than the cartoon. In the field it occurs in 13 to 28 percent of encounters, from Hurd’s and Maxwell’s studies in the 1990s^[21]. What it does was measured in 2016 by William Brown and Katherine Barry, who fed male Chinese mantises crickets labelled with a radioactive tracer and followed the atoms: females that ate their mate produced 88 eggs in the first clutch against 38 for females that did not, and 39 percent of the tracer in their reproductive tissue was male-derived against 21 percent, because a male passes about a quarter of his labelled amino acids in the ejaculate even when he survives^[21]. Males know the odds. Hungry females get a slower approach and more courtship^[22].

And then there are the birds. Martin Nyffeler’s 2017 survey collected 147 cases of mantises catching birds across 13 countries and every continent but Antarctica: 12 mantis species, 24 bird species, more than 70 percent of cases in the United States and most of those at hummingbird feeders, the ruby-throated hummingbird the usual victim. Of the birds caught, 78 percent were killed and eaten, 2 percent escaped, and 18 percent were freed by a person; the introduced Chinese and European mantises sold as garden pest control were flagged as novel predators^[23].

The mantis shrimp is a stomatopod, roughly 450 to 500 species, a lineage that split from true shrimps several hundred million years ago^[24]. Its eye is the most-repeated fact about it and the most misunderstood. It has twelve colour photoreceptor types sampling narrow bands from deep ultraviolet to far red, sixteen functional classes once ultraviolet and polarization are counted, against our three^[25][26]. The inference everyone draws is that it sees more colours. In 2014 Hanne Thoen and Justin Marshall tested that behaviourally and found “a surprisingly poor performance”: the animals needed colours about 12 to 25 nanometres apart to tell them apart, where a human manages a few. The eye does not discriminate; it recognises, scanning the twelve bands past a scene and reading colour the way a satellite reads a spectrum, in categories, fast, without comparison^[25]. It also sees circularly polarized light, a fourth kind of vision no other animal was known to have, demonstrated in 2008 and probably used in courtship^[27]. Marshall said it was as if colour vision had been discovered for the first time.

Sheila Patek filmed the peacock mantis shrimp at 5,000 frames a second in 2004 and measured a club moving at 14 to 23 m/s with peak accelerations of 6,300 to 8,000 g, driven by a saddle-shaped spring in the exoskeleton that the animal loads and latches; the high-speed images also showed vapour bubbles forming and collapsing next to the prey^[28]. The figure of 10,400 g that circulates online is not in the paper. The following year she measured the forces: each strike produces two peaks, 390 to 480 microseconds apart, a limb impact of 400 to 1,501 N and a cavitation collapse of up to 504 N, thousands of times the animal’s body weight, with the cavitation able to exceed the impact by 280 percent^[29]. The punch moves so fast it boils the water behind it, and the bubble closing is the second hit. A four-bar linkage in the limb roughly doubles the rotation, with energy stored at several sites in the cuticle^[30].

The club survives this because of how it is built. In 2012 James Weaver and David Kisailus described it as a composite of oriented hydroxyapatite crystals and amorphous calcium phosphate over a chitin matrix laid down in an expanded helicoid, each layer rotated from the last so cracks spiral and stall instead of running through; it withstands on the order of 50,000 strikes between moults, and the Air Force paid to copy it for armour^[31]. In April 1998 a four-inch specimen named Tyson at the Sea Life Centre in Great Yarmouth cracked a quarter-inch aquarium wall and was moved to a tougher tank; the story is from the Daily Mirror, not a journal, but Patek’s numbers make it unremarkable^[32].

The mantis was a prophet before it was an insect: Greek mantis means seer, from a verb meaning to be inspired, and the word moved to the animal in the 1650s^[33]. Among the ǀXam San of southern Africa, ǀKaggen is a trickster and maker who takes the form of a mantis; the Bleek and Lloyd archive recorded the stories in the 1870s, and modern readers caution that “the mantis god” is a European flattening of a figure whose name means “the one who deludes”^[34]. In the Zhuangzi the mantis raises its arms to stop a chariot, “unaware that it is not up to the task,” which is still the Chinese idiom for overreach^[35]; Northern Praying Mantis kung fu claims a Shandong founder, Wang Lang, who watched a mantis fight a cicada, in a legend whose century nobody agrees on^[36]. The stomatopod’s names are plainer. The Assyrians called it a sea locust; fishermen call it a thumb splitter and a prawn killer; in Hawaiian it is aloalo, a food, found in holes in dead coral^[37].

The three myths were wrong in the same direction. Each took a real, strange measurement and rounded it up to a superlative: sleeps in the air, only insect, sixteen colours. The corrections are not debunkings; they are upgrades. An albatross that holds its wings out on a tendon and borrows speed from the wind, at the heart rate of a bird standing on a beach, is a better story than one that naps. A mantis whose eye solves depth by watching things change is a better story than a neck. A shrimp that sees colour the way a scanner does, in twelve bins and no comparison, is a better story than a rainbow.

What I take from it is a habit. When a fact about an animal arrives as a superlative, the superlative is usually the part somebody added, and the paper under it is usually more specific and more surprising. The honest version is also more useful: the mantis’s stereo is being built into robots, the shrimp’s club into armour, the albatross’s soaring into drones. None of those came from the sentence people repeat. They came from someone gluing glasses to an insect with beeswax and counting.