World War II Naval sonar surveillance operators were routinely confounded by the high frequency, high noise sound made by colonies of "pistol shrimp" defending their territory by loudly snapping their claws. These impromptu jam sessions registered on headphones as a maddening din, throwing a wrench in submarine detection and driving sonar operators nuts. A snapping shrimp research program undertaken by the Listening Section of the University of California Department of War Research was followed by an entire National Defense Report, replete with detailed maps of Pacific Ocean locations the shrimps frequented, and the advice that while these zones might be avoided, there was no telling where the shrimp would migrate next. The inveterate pest was formally classified as the ocean's loudest invertebrate and maligned for its voluble complaining, until researchers finally subjected the shrimp to the "make lemonade" principle. In 2017 our project's own Jules Jaffe and his lab members assisted UCSD's Kastner lab in testing a way for Autonomous Underwater Explorers to use "impulsive sources of opportunity such as snapping shrimp" to self-localize as the swarm of unmanned underwater vehicles "deformed" in shallow surf. This contribution to Navigating the Pacific considers sonic inter-species standoffs in the shoals, crustacean voice and resistance, and oceangraphers' shellfishly opportunistic act of appropriating crustacean communication systems for unmanned operations.
Background image: Snappy shrimp and his Sea-food Six. University of California Division of War Research illustration of snapping shrimp, 1944. From the Robert William Young Papers, 1920-2002, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Photographs, UCSD Geisel Library
