mantis catching

thenewguy997

New member
I seen a critter last night i presume to be a mantis. It was really fast 2 inch long and went into a crevice

So im trying the bottle trap with can sardine until i get live bait whats a good bait?

Also i seen mine at night when i randoñly turned on lights, but ppl say theyre daytime creatures but i never see it so whats goimg on?

Also idk what its eating bc my tank has no livestock, it had a cute lil hh snail that i havent seen in a while i presume it was a hot lunch
 
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If nothing else is in the tank...here's what you can do to catch it. Get a 2liter bottle and cut it about five inches from the top. Then cut it two inches from the top. Find the place where you think it hangs at and then then kinda hollow out a small hole in the sand and place a piece of shrimp or something seafood-y in that hole and place the plastic around it. Be sure to make sure the outside of the plastic has good sand around it as for the mantis to crawl up on. Once it gets into the hole, it will be hard to come out as the walls are slanted and not enough sand to get a high reach and crawl out. Good luck. That is how I got my lobster out.
 
Will work for a lobster. I am skeptical that it would work for a mantis shrimp. But worth a try!
 
After several unsuccessful attempts, we managed to catch the one terrorizing our tank by accident (sort of). It occurred to me that the mantis was not fond of being exposed, so I thought that providing an opaque tube from his main hang out to the trap might be the way to go. We found a black, jointed tube at the lfs and used that. He liked it so much that he never went into the clear trap, and I was able to use two nets to enclose the jointed tube and lift it (and the mantis) into its own tank. (the tube we used to catch it is the one in my avatar).
 
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We are keeping it. It's a smithii. About 2 inches. We've got it in a plastic critter keeper which is inside our quarantine tank right now. This one, we've used cyanoacrylate to tack on some flat vacuum form plastic to the sides as a buffer against his clubs. because the last one we had him in only lasted two weeks without that (he knocked out a 1 by .5 inch hole out of the corner.)
 
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