Discovered a Mantis in my 55G today...

[RacingReefer]

This morning after feeding my fish I left the tank for an hour to come back to something staring back at me through a hole. I checked closer and sure enough I have a Mantis in my tank. He's a light tan color about an 1.5" - 2" long. He's hiding in hole in a live rock right at the top of my tank (lucky) so I'm going to try and dip the rock tonight to flush him out.

Only thing I can think of is that he came in my intial 25lbs of live rock as a hatchling or something. The tank is only 3 months old and the corals I've added had very little rock attached to them with no hiding places. A month after the tank started up I saw something that hid in the same rock but figured it was a worm of some sort.

If my dipping of the rock doesn't work or he moves what is the trap that most people would recommend?

Bill

 

[jsronce]

In the thread "Need a trap for a mantis" Achilles Tang suggests using a trap called the X-terminator, and how to set the sensitivity. Hope this helps, I've never trapped one.

If you do catch it, a lot of people on here (including me) would love to have it!

 

[Gonodactylus]

Gonodactylid stomatopods that typically end up in live rock are fairly slow growing. The following is a very rough estimate of size and age. If they don't get much to eat, they grow even slower. This estimate holds only for Neogonodactylus wennerae, N. bredini, N. oerstedii, and close relatives. It does not work for Odontodactylus, Lysiosquilla or squillids.

1 cm 1 month
2 cm 6 months
3 cm 18 months
4 cm 3 years
5 cm 5 years

Roy

 

[RacingReefer]

If I could isolate the exact rock he is in I would pull the rock and flush him out but two of the rocks in my tank have tons of passeges so I ordered the Xterminator trap. I'll try that out and hopefully won't trap my two peppermint or banded shrimp too many times.

Bill