Hello everyone! I wanted to share my experience with "clicking" TBS rock. We put 150# of TBS in our tank in Feb of this year. Started to hear clicking right away. We figured it was the dreaded mantis and indeed noticed 3 of them in our tank during our nightly tank watching. I got the first 2 out easily. The last one I could not catch. I was pulling out rock and rearranging rock to no end and disturbing everyone else in the tank. So I decided I would live with it awhile until I could come up with a better plan. Meanwhile the clicking continued....the mantis grew and we noticed that he bothered.....nothing! He did eat a few snails but did not touch any fish, cleaner shrimp, pistol shrimp or anything else. He did not even go after those nasty gorilla crabs I was trying to get rid of 
I finally caught him while trying to remove a dead sea urchin one morning. I put him in my QT. And the same clicking continued! The same exact noise. And there are no other mantis in the tank; I am sure. They are so nosy the ones we had always poked their heads out to see what was going on. I put some shells in the QT with the mantis for him to use as cover and then I finally hear what his click REALLY sounds like. Very metallic like and more of a "chink, chink" noise; kind of like clicking 2 dimes together and it was a much softer noise than the louder clicks I had always heard in my reef. There is a point to my long story: All that rocking snatching and mantis searching I did bothered everyone in my tank but the mantis. Maybe bide your time and you'll catch them soon enough. They don't eat/destroy everything in your tank. The noises I heard have been coming from, I believe, my pistol shrimp all along. I have 2 that I know of.
I finally caught him while trying to remove a dead sea urchin one morning. I put him in my QT. And the same clicking continued! The same exact noise. And there are no other mantis in the tank; I am sure. They are so nosy the ones we had always poked their heads out to see what was going on. I put some shells in the QT with the mantis for him to use as cover and then I finally hear what his click REALLY sounds like. Very metallic like and more of a "chink, chink" noise; kind of like clicking 2 dimes together and it was a much softer noise than the louder clicks I had always heard in my reef. There is a point to my long story: All that rocking snatching and mantis searching I did bothered everyone in my tank but the mantis. Maybe bide your time and you'll catch them soon enough. They don't eat/destroy everything in your tank. The noises I heard have been coming from, I believe, my pistol shrimp all along. I have 2 that I know of.
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