fish and shrimp disappearing??

[leviwin]

I just reciently returned from a week vacation on the Oregon Coast to find out that my CB Shrimp and orange diamond goby were gone without a trace. I had a friend feed the fish once a day with a specific amount of food for each day. A couple of weeks before going i added some live rock and had a cleaner shrimp die a couple of weeks after doing so. Thought he just got into a fight with the CBS but it appears that I was wrong. I think i might have gotten some kind of a pest with the live rock but I'm not sure. The water quality is good everthing is at 0 except for nitrates which are at 10ppm and I Just did a water change. Does anybody else have an Idea what it could be? Or could you help me find a link on how to make a trap to capture what ever might be in my tank. I'm thinking it is some thing like a mantis shrimp. Thanks

 

[leigh]

Sounds mantis like. Do you find any cracked shells around the tank? Do you hear clicking ever? The coke bottle trap has been known to catch a mantis--but mostly, it seems that the easiest way to remove a mantis is if you can confirm that you have a mantis--then find the rock it burrows, remove the rock and then use any number of tricks to get him out of the rock and into a bucket (ie place the rock in air above a bucket, slosh the rock around in a bucket, flush the rock with seltzer water or hypersaline water, etc...) Good luck!

 

[leviwin]

I found a couple of cracked shells but haven't seen the shrimp yet. What exactly is the clicking sound like? Is it loud enough to hear over the sound of water going into the overflow and down into the refugium and do they make this sound only at certain times? ie. when they are killing something, during the night or day.

 

[leigh]

they'll do it night or day, but more at night--it can be quite loud--loud enough to hear over water flow down the hall and in another room--though it may sound like a mechanical pump type click. when you hear it it may be them killing something--but it may also be the sound of them digging/tunneling in the rock.

 

[leviwin]

thanks
I've heard of people building traps out of old bottles to catch them. Do these work very well and if so how do you build one?

 

[leigh]

work sometimes--often you catch what you don't intend to catch--search for "coke bottle trap" and it should turn up a ton of input for you!

 

[leviwin]

did a search on coke bottle trap and didn't have much luck do you have any idea how it works?

 

[lesa]

I took a tall clean drinking glass and wrapped a piece of krill around a small piece of rock and leaned the glass at a 45 degree angle and PRESTO I caught the little critter

 

[leigh]

Originally posted by Leviwin
did a search on coke bottle trap and didn't have much luck do you have any idea how it works?
that's odd...when i search under 'coke bottle trap' i turn up 33 threads. this is cut and paste from one of my previous posts on the subject (turned up from that search):
the punch line is you whack the top off a coke bottle, put food in the bottom, invert the top, stick it back on and submerge it overnight--typically you'll catch something, not necessarily what you want to catch, but something.

 

[leviwin]

Thanks i did a search here on this website and found the results i needed. Thought of that just after I wrote my last post and couldn't find it with a yahoo search.