Black drum is a fish from the United States with one of the strongest bite force in the fish world. It can easily crunch through shells, its main source of food. Weight for weight, it has a bite that is as strong as the bite of a crocodile.
The jaw of this fish has scientists fascinated: it is not made of cortical bone, like most jaws, and it has a 3D arrangement of beams. “This is something never seen before in any other animal. It looks like a sponge… how can such a structure, which seems weak, carry all this load?” queries project leader Ron Shahar, veterinarian and engineer at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
In the quest to find how this structure is built and how it operates, Shahar is joined by Paul Zaslansky, a dentist at the Charité Hospital in Berlin (Germany), as well as physicists Alexander Rack and Marta Majkut at the ESRF.
Read more on the ESRF website
Image: A detailed view of the set-up with the jaw and all the teeth
Credit: A. Rack