Found a mantis

im talkin about small blue leg hermits not the big ones... and yeah the goldfish here are 13 cents a piece. im tryin to figure out what kind of mantis that is for you.

 

alot of people eat them in Hong Kong, and they are pretty good.

 

Yep people eat them. They eat the super ugly ones though It's like fish. You don't eat clownfish or pretty butterfly fish, you eat the big ugly ones that taste good. Same with mantis. I've never had one though, it'd probably be just like a longer lobster tail. Or maybe taste like a cross between lobster and shrimp.

And that guy's got no chance of breaking your glass, unless you give him a hammer or a gun or something Idk on the species, but he shouldn't grow any bigger than 3 or 4 inches.

We feed our smaller mantis cerith snails. They're pretty small snails. We also feed frozen krill and mysis. Bo, our 3.5" mantis can eat a whole krill, but our little guy (1 inch long) needs them in pieces They're super easy to take care of. I wouldn't be worried.

 

I found some images of mantis shrimp food. As in, mantis shrimp cooked for human consumption. I won't post any on here because I don't want to gross out any mantis lovers, but if you google image search "mantis shrimp food", you'll get some educational pictures. Apparently there's fried mantis shrimp, and mantis shrimp on a skewer, and stuff. Interesting. As long as they're the big (I mean BIG) ugly spearing ones they eat, I guess I'm ok with it

 

my mantis curls up and lays on his back all the time. i call it "personality" hahah

 

I like the blue legged ones lol.

 

I'm not too worried about him breaking the glass anymore really. I'm more worried about putting my hand in there to prune macro algae.
I'll try to get some snails this weekend. Hopefully he holds out with the raw shrimp until then.

Personality for real. I check in on him from time to time and he's in all these weird positions lol.

 

Yeah they like weird positions Sometimes it'll scare the poop out of me, I'll be looking for our larger mantis and then I'll round a corner and there he is right in front of my face hanging upside down from a rock staring at me.

And our big mantis whacked my fingernail once...that hurt. Alot. I'm glad it hit my nail instead of skin But a little mantis like that shouldn't be too bad That's how our LFS found my smaller one. An employee was moving some rock and my little guy came out and smashed his hand. The guy wasn't hurt and grabbed the mantis and called me. Now I have him at home and he's a hyper little bugger.

 

hummm. I hope to never get whacked by one. Now I'm even thinking about wearing some padded gloves the next time I go diving.:

 

I am currently in the process of catching one. It's been in the live rock for like 3 weeks now. You hear him hammer the stone a lot. Especially at night. I only caught one glimpse of one for a few seconds while it was swimming around. It's very small, about 3cm maybe, and it seemed to be cream white/greenish. It's Indonesian live rock.

I've got a bottle trap set up now. But I am a bit worried that it will take a while because it's so shy and I don't know which rock it lives in. Also, I'm considering keeping it as a pet in a smaller aquarium. But I am worried I will basically never see it. Will this behavior change?

Also, there are a lot of amphipods around for it to eat. No reason to go for the bait. I guess I will have to set up several traps with different types of bait. But I have seen some stories of people that also have very shy hitchhiking mantises who won't fall for the bottle trap after months. Is there an alternative? I want to avoid taking the rock out of the water at all cost and preserve all life in it. Only thing I have come up with is sealing individual rocks inside plastic bags and putting the rock in the small mantis tank until I transferred the rock with the mantis hiding inside.