Baby Mantis on LR?

[vapester]

.....awhile back I posted a thread asking for help raising what I thought might be baby Mantis on a small live rock I fished out of local waters here in about 85 feet. FWIW, I finally found out what they were, it was a small colony of skeleton shrimp. I saw a pic of them yesterday. They were all clinging to a small gargonian. The tiny tank I put them in didn't have adequate filtration to deal with the rock I think among other things and they didn't last very long. But they were the coolest lil things i've ever seen. Too bad there's no where to get them to grow a colony in a lil nano reef or something.

It looked exactly like these pics...http://www.divebums.com/FishID/Pages/skeleton_shrimp.html

 

[Kara]

They are very cool looking, kind of like an oceanic version of a walking stick! Do you know what they eat? If they have a commensual relationship with anything? How big they get? They look like they would stay pretty small.

The rock probably caused your tank to have a small cycle and the swings in the water chemistry probably killed them.

 

[vapester]

....here's some info on the lil critters.....

Skeleton Shrimp, common name for a group of small crustaceans, frequently found living among finely branched seaweeds. Skeleton shrimp are so slender and threadlike in form and often so protectively colored that they are seldom discovered among the branches of hydroids, bryozoans, and seaweeds. In addition, skeleton shrimp accentuate their adaptive form and coloration by assuming an angular pose very much like that of the fronds among which they live. They are an important component of the marine food chain.

The largest skeleton shrimp in American Atlantic waters is the long-horn skeleton shrimp; it reaches a length of 54 mm (about 2 in). Another species, the California skeleton shrimp, is found on eelgrass along the central and southern coast of California; it reaches a length of 35 mm (about 1.5 in).

Scientific classification: Skeleton shrimps are members of the family Caprellidae in the order Amphipoda. The long-horn skeleton shrimp is classified as Aeginella longicornis. The California skeleton shrimp is classified as Caprella californica

 

[lilswanwillow]

as a mantis lover (land-ones, I do have a pair, believe it or not) they definately would grow on me!!!!!