nmonks
A stroke of the brush does not guarantee art from
Hello --
At university I kept a fair number of Odontodactylus and Gonodactylus species mantis shrimps (a.k.a stomatopods). I've also kept Squilla species caught in estuaries in Florida for a while. They're very easy to look after and don't destroy aquaria. We kept about half a dozen in one tank, with the tank divided up with mesh partitions (they are highly territorial). Each shrimp was give a piece of PVC tubing as a burrow. We were studying their balance organs; unlike most other crustaceans, they don't have statocysts, gravity sensing organs a bit like out semi-circular canals. So how they know which way is up was (and may still be) a mystery.
These shrimps are smart and make excellent pets. They eat anything, from small snails through to chunks of prawn. There space requirements are minimal and they are astonishingly hardy: a 10 gallon tank with a bubble up filter and waste seawater from your main aquarium will suit most species just fine.
They are amazing animals. For example, each eye works like our pair of eyes, seeing binocular vision, so they can focus on two things at once. They have colour vision, but unlike ours, their vision extends into the ultraviolet. They are actually very ancient crusteaceans, with an ancestry going back around 350 million years (crabs, by contrast, only turned up in the last 100 or so million years). One of the cutest things about them is their "windscreen wiper" that seemingly fold out of nowhere and are used to clean their eyes.
Odontodactylus scyllarus was a smasher species, but never once did I see one try to break its way out. They don't think like that, because that would assume they realise that the glass was trapping them and on the other side is freedom. They're smart, but not that smart. Those videos you see with them smashing glass are staged, with glass used as a box with food on the other side, and the shrimps trained to smash glass to get food out. So long as you don't train them to do that in your aquarium, you're fine.
An example of how smart they are: We used the metal poles to feed the shrimps, sticking bits of prawn onto them. The matis shrimps would attack the food and then drag it into their burrow. After just ONE trial with a metal pole without food, they would recognise "empty" poles and ignore them. Show me a fish, even a pufferfish, that learns something in a single trial.
They will of course eat small fish, but there preferred prey is crustaceans and especially molluscs. I like this quote from mantis shrimp expert Dr. Roy Caldwell: "I find them far more interesting in an aquarium than most fish. The trick is finding the right species for the right tank".
Cheers,
Neale
PS There is a good site on their biology here:
http
/www.blueboard.com/mantis/
And this site has some useful aquarium info:
http/saltaquarium.about.com/cs/msubpestm.../a/aa110498.htm
At university I kept a fair number of Odontodactylus and Gonodactylus species mantis shrimps (a.k.a stomatopods). I've also kept Squilla species caught in estuaries in Florida for a while. They're very easy to look after and don't destroy aquaria. We kept about half a dozen in one tank, with the tank divided up with mesh partitions (they are highly territorial). Each shrimp was give a piece of PVC tubing as a burrow. We were studying their balance organs; unlike most other crustaceans, they don't have statocysts, gravity sensing organs a bit like out semi-circular canals. So how they know which way is up was (and may still be) a mystery.
These shrimps are smart and make excellent pets. They eat anything, from small snails through to chunks of prawn. There space requirements are minimal and they are astonishingly hardy: a 10 gallon tank with a bubble up filter and waste seawater from your main aquarium will suit most species just fine.
They are amazing animals. For example, each eye works like our pair of eyes, seeing binocular vision, so they can focus on two things at once. They have colour vision, but unlike ours, their vision extends into the ultraviolet. They are actually very ancient crusteaceans, with an ancestry going back around 350 million years (crabs, by contrast, only turned up in the last 100 or so million years). One of the cutest things about them is their "windscreen wiper" that seemingly fold out of nowhere and are used to clean their eyes.
Odontodactylus scyllarus was a smasher species, but never once did I see one try to break its way out. They don't think like that, because that would assume they realise that the glass was trapping them and on the other side is freedom. They're smart, but not that smart. Those videos you see with them smashing glass are staged, with glass used as a box with food on the other side, and the shrimps trained to smash glass to get food out. So long as you don't train them to do that in your aquarium, you're fine.
An example of how smart they are: We used the metal poles to feed the shrimps, sticking bits of prawn onto them. The matis shrimps would attack the food and then drag it into their burrow. After just ONE trial with a metal pole without food, they would recognise "empty" poles and ignore them. Show me a fish, even a pufferfish, that learns something in a single trial.
They will of course eat small fish, but there preferred prey is crustaceans and especially molluscs. I like this quote from mantis shrimp expert Dr. Roy Caldwell: "I find them far more interesting in an aquarium than most fish. The trick is finding the right species for the right tank".
Cheers,
Neale
PS There is a good site on their biology here:
http
/www.blueboard.com/mantis/And this site has some useful aquarium info:
http
/saltaquarium.about.com/cs/msubpestm.../a/aa110498.htm
(Although now that I know better I'd keep him in a tank by himself and I think I would employ a feeding stick!! 
I'll try reloading them up later. The one picture has a normal bristleworm right next to this thing so you can see the comparison.
Anything to get rid of that 'Fish Addict' BS out of there 
