P. Ciliata

Anyone have any experience with these guys? I'm grabbing one tomorrow, and I'm wondering what everyone has had success with in regards to feeding them? I know they'll take fish/shrimp/thawed scallops/clams, but anything else? Anyone had any experience with them going after snails or anything?

Thanks!

 

P. ciliata is a spearer, and as such, we generally fed ours pieces of fish from a feeding stick. Sometimes if it was acting shy, we'd simply leave the food on the stick and walk away. They will, however, go after snails, crabs, etc, if they're hungry, as they can use their "elbows" as clubs.

This mantis is my fave besides the peacock.

 

Awesome thanks for the input! They attracted me a lot because of the fact that it may be easier to keep a cuc in with them. Did you ever feed them live fish? Or just silverside or something along those lines?

 

I'm also wondering outside of some coral, what else have you kept with P. Ciliata? I realize they're normally species only tanks, but would something like a feather duster be okay?

 

We keep preds, so the mantids all got SW fish chunks, shrimp, bivalves, squid, etc. Every so often, we'd toss something live to them (a damsel, ghostie, small crab, etc).

As far as what to keep with it, we've kept urchins with them. You can keep other things like dusters, coral, etc. but your mantis may decide they want to add them to thier lair.

Our ciliata actually had a black ABS lair hidden in the LR/substrate: