Shall I tell you about my mantis experience? Well, when I first got my live rock (first time saltwater) I had a mantis in there. At the time I thought he was pretty cool and I even used to feed him by hand!! LOL!! God I was naive!! He was a smasher type...that means that he would take out anything with a shell but he left the fish alone. At first I kinda didn't mind, but then he killed a bunch of stuff and I finally figured out that he had to go. The first thing I tried was a mantis trap I bought at the LFS. Baited it, set it, figured I'd have me a mantis in the morning. Too bad that my green brittlestar wanted that bait too. Lost an arm in there....I figured that the brittlestar would learn not to do that again, but by the third night I had to stop using the trap as the brittlestar was running out of legs. Then I tried the "take the rock out" method. The bad thing about that was the rock that was "his" was the biggest rock, a base rock and it was a terrible pain to get it out. But I did it. Took it outside and flushed the rock with tap water, then left the rock to bake in the sun for hours. Scrubbed and flushed the rock again, and put it back in the tank. The next morning I saw the mantis, and he gave me a dirty look. I took the rock back out again, this time I flushed it with a calcium supplement. Ever have that stuff come in contact with an open cut? Hurts like crazy and it should have burned that mantis but that didn't work either. Then I tried a medicine for fish (can't remember which it was exactly) but it said on the bottle "harmful to inverts". I took all my other inverts out of the tank, removed the fish and dosed the tank. At this point I didn't care what I might hurt on the rocks, I just wanted this shrimp gone. Two days later I cleaned up the tank, did a water change and all that, and put all the corals and snails back in the tank. I was so confident that I had done the deed.....
Next morning I caught a glimpse of him. Looked really healthy too.
I finally had to declare a truce...and for the next year or so, I would provide snails or the occasional hermit for him to eat and he would let me.
When we moved, I changed my 55g over to saltwater too, and decided to put the mantis rock in there with the yellow tang and the lionfish. On the first day in there, the mantis came out to look over his new domain and the lionfish crept up on him and shwwwoooshhh in one quick movement he had done what I could not do!!
So, my suggestion to you is either dedicate a tank to this animal as they are rather unique, or get yourself a lionfish or trigger. :joy:
Good luck and if you get it out alive, post it for sale over on -- in the mantis forum....people will actually PAY for one of these!!
