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Colourful Mantis Shrimp Image credit: www.tumblr,com

We often see animals fight each other over mates or territory. These fights usually result in injuries to fighting individuals, until one retreats or it is death that decides the eventual winner and the one that gets the mate or territory. As bloody and gruesome as it might sound, we know that this is the law of nature and how things work in the wild.

Except that mantis shrimp have found a way out of all the blood shed and a calmer and more civilized way to settle their differences. Instead of using their powerful front limbs to annihilate their own, mantis shrimp use them to engage in what looks like a boxing match to decide who reigns and who should retreat.

Research conducted at the Duke University in North Carolina showed that these shrimps use their tail plates as shields and use the number of punches rather than the power of the punch to decide the winner of the contest. Here is a short video from our friends at Live Science