am i crazy!?!?!?!

well my reefs been going pretty good lately corals are growing extremely fast.starting to restock after my dad decided to turn my battery air pump off during a power outage and kill all but afew fish.my gha problem is almost gone only afew little patches left and my sea hare is now eating nori and letuce. im now concidering 2 huge "problem" additions that most of you will wonder what i am doing .....addition #1 tap water.i want to keep my sea hare happy and i dont mind the gha so much but i love my sea hare.i dont plan to go adding straight tap water i am setting up a 55 gallon tank in my basement that i will be running some form of copper removal in a hob filter.

my next addition is ted. ted is my peacock mantis that ive had for a pretty long time now.hes about 6-7 inches and extremely well trained.i can hold him turn him over pet him pretty much anything i want. he will only eat what i give him out of my hand and hasnt touched a snail or crab in his tank for well over 2 months( unless he took it out of my hand).he currently lives with a pylie wrasse and my 2 ppicasso clowns in a 29 biocube.i think im going to section off part of the tank so he gets comfortable and starts to accept food from me again and his training is reinforced then he will move the partition and give him more room and continue this till the tank is all his to roam.he was in his tank with a squamosa(sp) clam for afew months till i soold it and he never touched it

what do you guys think?

 

I think I'd like to see a video of you hand feeding/handling "Ted" or at the the very least some pics of the O. Scy.

 

ill get some pics. idk how to get vids on the computer hes a little camera shy but ill see what i can do

 

Sounds pretty cool! I'd love to see a vid of him eating from your hands.

 

Why risk it? Remember they are still wild animals and just b/c they are behaving now, doesn't mean that at any point in the future they still will be.

 

just adding another element into my tank ... i like challenges.i know they are wild animals but i think they are similar to dogs in that they are wild and have the potential there to snap and become vicious but i think te is not going to go after anything if hes well fed and his food is presented to him everyday on his normal schedual

 

Let's see the video!!!!!

 

I agree with GuitarMan.

I don't agree they're anything like dogs. People think that about wild animals all the time & find out wrong. It's a shrimp, it has nowhere near the brain capacity of a dog or any other mammal. My guess would be your sea hare will be the first to go...

 

wooah hold on one second there. First of all they are not shrimp, they are stomatopods. Secondly their brains is a lot more sophisticated and complex then you would believe. I say brains because they actually have three. Two of which are dedicated to their extremely complex eyes, which give the stomatopod the best vision of any animal. Stomatopods are capable of learning and remembering for long times.

All of my stomatopods were infinitely more intelligent than my beagle.


All that aside. Yes your crazy. I am with guitarman and sushigirl. As intelligent as stomatopods are, they can be just a brutal. Even being fed they have been known to go on killing sprees that are apparently not motivated by food, as they will leave the uneaten carcasses littering the tank. This behavior is usually seen in G. chiragra it seems, but why risk it if you don't have to?

 

OK, I stand corrected on brains, even if 2 of them are running vision only. No comment on the smarts of a beagle. Now the poodle/beagle mix we had when I was a kid, she was a genius!

You know, to me it's like having a shark & thinking if you keep it fed & pet it that it won't do what it was originally built to do...kill other things & eat them! You can train a lot of creatures to do a lot of things, but you can't train out instict...even in people!

Edit: I also stand corrected on the shrimp thing...I know that, don't know what I was thinking!