Patrick Green

I'm interested in connections between animal behavior and biomechanics, using animal weapons as a study system. I'm currently studying how mantis shrimp resolve aggressive contests. Since mantis shrimp have weapons that can easily crack open prey items, how do they resolve contests without killing each other? So far, I've found that size-matched competitors use the ritualized exchange of strikes on the tailplate (telson) to resolve contests, and that winners strike a greater number of times, not with greater force (Green & Patek 2015). I'm currently using biomechanical analyses to investigate energy transfer during this "telson sparring", and further behavioral analyses to study the transitions between sparring and other contest behaviors. See more info at my personal website: http://people.duke.edu/~pag16/