Peacocks / O.scyllarus
Are in my opinion the most difficult to care for commonly available species, of both smashers & spearers.
Due to their abnormal requirements and attentions, the peacocks are NOT the ambassadors of the Stomatopods HARDY Resilience (that goes to the small smashers who survive live rock curing process to hitchhike into aquariums).
Things Peacocks NEED for long term survival the smaller smasher...laugh at lol.
Most smaller smashers don't even know what shell rot is and yet it's practically the main killer of peacocks in aquariums.
The lighting issue with Peacocks stems from the water itself not directly the light.
So you CAN have 400watt lights etc. IF and ONLY IF your water quality is at a level where SPS corals are growing in your system (best laymen term for what is needed for peacocks water quality).
Superior Water quality = Any lighting.
Inferior Water quality = Little / NO lighting.
This water quality stems forth from your own personal systems design or care methods, for example I personally wouldn't be putting bright lights on a peacock tank unless I had a lot of the bells and whistles in filtration (Skimmer, RODI ATO, Reactors, Refugium, etc).
However I didn't have all that but because I knew the animal then the avg joe I never kept the lights on the tank above the peacock and I also kept the peacock in a tank attached to a much larger system increasing the overall water quantity which reduced the overall speed of parameter shifts which just meant slightly better water for slightly longer periods before water changes.
Then there is the burrows...in the wild these large smashers make very large burrows, I saw a doco where a peacock was making its burrow whilst a diver followed it and after around an hour the peacocks finished burrow was the size of the diver sitting on the seafloor beside it, this is something we simply cannot replicate in an aquarium.
The burrow must have a place of UTTER DARKNESS 0 LIGHT.
The burrow must have GOOD FLOW through its entirety.
Then finally if all goes well here we come to the damned dreaded molting and it's simply stated as this....
The larger the animal, the greater the risk of something going wrong during the molt that leads to its death and who is NOT to say that better water quality & better burrow design would make for a more successful molt...
So in the aquarium peacocks tend to die one of 2 ways.
- Shell Rot (poor water & lights).
- Molting (poor water & poor burrow / bad luck).
It's easy to want to impulse buy the most colorful stomatopod that happens to be the largest commonly available smasher.
