The mantis shrimp resembles the shrimp you eat, only it is about 5 inches long. It is interesting because it has shown the capability to develop a mind.

Mantis shrimp tend to cause havoc in aquariums, quickly demolishing the other forms of life and riddling the environment with tunnels, that allow it to quickly move from any part of the tank to any other, without observers seeing how they get there.

Jack Cohen and his students performed an experiment on the mantis shrimp. It was clear that it had some level of sophistication in its brain, but they wanted to see if it could develop a mind.

The began feeding it smaller shrimp, simply by dropping them into the tank. As soon as they got close to one of the tunnel openings, the mantis shrimp would pop out and eat the shrimp. After doing this for awhile, they placed the shrimp in a small plastic container. The first time they did this, the mantis shrimp wrestled with the container until it came open, and then ate the smaller shrimp from inside.

They continued feeding it shrimp in this way for awhile, and then they added a rubber band to the container, sealing it shut. The mantis shrimp took a little while to learn how to remove the band, but soon it could eat the shrimp from a banded plastic container easily.

After feeding the shrimp in this manner for some time, they returned to putting the shrimp in without any container. The first time they did this, the mantis shrimp seemed disappointed. It saw the shrimp outside of any container, and refused to eat it until it became too hungry to wait.

There is no way to prove this, but it is assumed that the shrimp was developing a primitive mind, and was beginning to enjoy the puzzles that it faced to get its food.

If this is true, it is proof of the theory of intelligence versus extelligence. These principles are beyond the scope of this writeup, but in its simplest form it states that for a mind to develop, it requires intelligence, but it will not develop in isolation. It also requires extelligence, meaning other sources of intelligence for it to interact with.

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