think i have a mantis...:(

[jbm109]

well i am sitting up in my living room at 2 am as i cannot sleep........and i can hear the telltale click of a mantis shrimp coming from my tank, have been set up for 4 months now and first time i have heard it.............now how do i get rid of it??

i know i need to find where it is living, but i have been sitting silently for an hour and have seen no trace...............

is there an easy way of spotting them, or am i going to have to rip my tank apart looking.........

cheers,
a very frustrated jess!

 

[redsea reefer]

Well its either a mantis or pistol shrimp. Try the slanted jar with some food trap, just rest a glass jar kinda slanted up against a rock for a few days. If that doesn't work the you have no choice but to rip apart rocks.

Be careful ifs its a mantis, they can do a number on your digits. I would use tongs and wear gloves.

 

[yycguy]

Well all I can say is "goodluck" I had a Mantis and got rid of him, but now I have another click click grrrrrrrr. I did try the trap method but only caught snails and my cleaner shrimp so no luck for me on that method. I found after several months he became more brave snatching food when I was feeding the fish/corals. One day I saw him come out and grab a piece of mysis and go back in a rock. I quickly snagged that rock out and placed it in a bucket. I then increased the salinity till out of the rock he came.
Now for round two!!!
One thing I did notice with mantis are they ever quick!

 

[dmyers557]

Good luck. I'm afraid you need to find the rock he lives in and remove it to get him.

 

[jbm109]

so i guess just keep an eye out at feeding times, all my obvious holes are inhabited by fish, will are all still ok....so i think it is somewhere obscure.......

many evening of just watching and waiting i guess.....

used the glass with a fish technique to catch some pesky crabs that i had and have caught 5 in total over 6 nights, but no sign of the mantis.......how do i stop it just swimming right back out again like my cleaner shrimp do??
or can mantis shrimp not swim??

 

[framerguy]

I have one living in my tank. No problems so far. What problem do you foresee other than losing an occasional snail? Find it and put food out for it and enjoy the diversity of life in your tank. I doubt it will do much damage if you keep it fat and happy. They are slaves to their stomach. Keep it full.

 

[Spikewire]

If you don't find that monster it will rise up from the depths of hell AND KILL YOU IN YOUR SLEEP!!! :bluemad:

kidding

I can see framerguys's point but those things just creep me out.

 

[proenca]

Well Mantis is a hard one.

To be honest, the best thing is either :

a ) - do what Greg says and keep them happy and well fed. apart from the occasional snail, they wont do much harm and add a twist of excitment on the tank : they can break the glass at any given time !

b ) traps rarely works well ; best thing is try to locate him and then remove the rock and remove the thing.

Word of caution tough : the use of gloves is merely fictional... in Asia , mantis shrimps are called THUMB SPLITTERS for a very good reason : they can open your thumb in two faster than you can blink... so wearing gloves is .. well... you get the point

Just be REALLY carefull when handling that rock.

Last tip : there are two types of Mantis : spearers and bashers.

"Spearers" have a longish spear on which they impale fish ; Bashers are the most dangerous ones since they hammer whatever goes in front of their burrow : snails ( thats how they get to them, they break their shells ) , aquarium glass, your thumb , etc...

Bashers were, until recently, the fastest movement known in the animal kingdom to date. They do it so fast that the "hammer" traveling cavitates in the water and creates a high pressure / high temperature "mass" in front of the hammer and that is what stuns the fish/snail/whatever. BEFORE the impact. which is 0.00001ms away once you get hit by the caviatation.

Trully remarkable animals.

 

[jbm109]

well, i am new to the reefing world, and the only posts i have read about mantis are the problems they cause.........i thought eventually it would eat some fish.............or break the glass......


when i find where it lives i will feed it regularly as suggested and hope no problems occur...............i think my mind will be at ease when i know where its burrow is, as then if a problem develops i can whip it out quickly!!

scary i re-aqua scaped last week, and was pulling all my rocks around for hours......could have been very painful!!!

thanks for the ideas!

 

[proenca]

Still, I think they are impressive animals.

Few excerts :

Patek managed to capture footage of a smasher’s strike, slowed down over 800 times. What she found was staggering. With each punch, the club’s edge travels at about 50 mph, over twice as fast as scientists had previously estimated.*

“The strike is one of the fastest limb movements in the animal kingdom”, says Patek. “It’s especially impressive considering the substantial drag imposed by water.”
Water is much denser than air and even the quickest martial artist would have considerable difficulty punching in it. And yet the mantis shrimp’s finishes its strike in under three thousandths of a second, out-punching even its land-living namesake.


But Patek found that even this system couldn’t account for the mantis shrimp’s speed. Instead, the key to the punch is a small, structure in the arm that looks like a saddle or a Pringle chip.

When the arm is cocked, this structure is compressed and acts like a spring, storing up even more energy. When the latch is released, the spring expands and provides extra push for the club, helping to accelerate it at up to 10,000 times the force of gravity.


Patek’s cameras revealed an even bigger surprise – each of the smasher’s strikes produced small flashes of light upon impact. They are emitted because the club moves so quickly that it lowers the pressure of the water in front of it, causing it to boil.

This releases small bubbles which collapse when the water pressure normalises, unleashing tremendous amounts of energy. This process, called cavitation, is so destructive that it can pit the stainless steel of boat propellers. Combined with the force of the strike itself, no animal in the seas stands a chance.

Large smashers can even make meals of crabs, buckling their thick armour as easily as they do aquarium glass. And they are often seen beating up much larger fish and octopuses, which are unfortunate enough to wander past their burrows.


The mantis shrimp – the world’s fastest punch « Not Exactly Rocket Science

 

[nanoreefing4fun]

Gonçalo interesting... thanks for sharing...

 

[Reefmack]

Thanks for the great article Gonçalo. I've read that the Mantis are considered by many as the most intelligent crustaceans - probably why they're so hard to catch!