Experts in Marine Biology believe they have identified the most efficient and lethal marine predator living today. It's not the shark, which would be the obvious choice, of course. It's not the orca, the barracuda, the moray eel, the stingray or the giant squid either. Not even close.
Nope, it turns out the creature with the ultimate ninja-level undersea hunting skills is this adorable little seahorse.
Photo by Nick Hobgood/Wikimedia Commons
According to I Fucking Love Science, Brad J. Gemmell from the University of Texas at Austin’s Marine Science Institute has published a paper in the journal Nature explaining how the seahorse's strange body shape and super-slow movement actually makes it a totally deadly assassin of the sea.
Gemmell's study explains that this seeming lazy swimming speed allows the seahorse to sneak up on copepods, tiny crustaceans which move incredibly fast. When the predator gets close enough, its curved head makes it easy to whip forward and snap up the prey before it knows what hit it. The technique apparently works 90% of the time, and this video shows it in action: