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By far your impressions for seahorses might be slow and awkward looking creatures. But a new study is going to change all that.

Seahorses turn into ferocious and ingenious predators when it comes to hunting down their preys, a new study finds. They use a secret weapon to sneak up on their prey.

These beautiful looking creatures are generally bad swimmers because of their peculiar shaped snouts. These snouts are shaped to create very few ripples in water. But when a prey is nearer, they act with blazing fast speed.

“The seahorse is one the slowest swimming fish we know of, but it’s able to capture prey that swim at incredible speeds,” said Brad Gemmell, author of the study in Nature Communications, according to Reuters.

The most favorite and general prey for seahorses are copepods. These are extremely small crustaceans.

“Seahorses can overcome one of the most talented escape artists in the aquatic world,” said Dr Gemmell.

“In calm conditions, they catch their intended prey 90% of the time. That’s extremely high, and we wanted to know why.”

A special method known as pivot feeding is their preferred way of dining. Their arched necks act as spring which allows them to rapidly rotate their heads and swallow their prey.

However this suction works at very short distances and the effective range is found to be 1 millimeter. Surprisingly the strike takes place in less than 1 millisecond.

The team of researchers studied the dwarf seahorse. They filmed their movement of water around the fish in 3D using holography.

“It’s like an arms race between predator and prey, and the seahorse has developed a good method for getting close enough so that their striking distance is very short,” added Dr Gemmell, according to Reuters.

“People don’t often think of seahorses as amazing predators, but they really are.”