Need ID help

AttackDonut

New member
LFS got an errant Mantis in. Small, about 1.5" long. Took him home for my nano tank.

Put him in and he went exploring. No pics yet, but got some good looks at his colouration.

His body is dark purple. The underside, near his smashers is bright green. The last swimming fins on him have blue/green spots.

Ideas? He's cute.
 
The only small, purple gonodactylid that I can think of is one color morph of Gonodactylellus espinosa from the Indo-Pacific. It is common in coralline algae in French Polynesia and Tonga, so if the LR is from Tonga, Fiji, etc, this is a possibility.

If the animal came from Florida, it is probably a deep water Neogonodactylus wennerae. At times they can take on a purplish appearence. I'll try to post a picture of one that might prove similar.

Roy
 
Wonderful

Wonderful

Some pics, or links to places that have good pics, would be wonderful. That way I could ID him and get feeding routines, size limits, etc etc.
 
So would that be

So would that be

a smasher or a spearer? I need to make sure I offer the proper food.

Thanks for the link, I'll be reading it now.
 
Dr. Roy-

Dr. Roy-

Just found your lab home page. The pic of the rubik's cube and the mantis is *hysterical*! How in the world did you film that? I presume there were smoke and mirrors involved.

Is it possible to get a good clean copy of that video for my archives?
 
The program (Fastest Claw in the West) that this teaser was shot for displayed some of our learning experiments where we trained animals to manipulate and smash into hollow plastic cubes with one glass face It was a simple matter to give a trained animal a keychain Rubik's Cube and film it trying to find the area to break to get a piece of shrimp. I took the cube back periodically and changed the pattern, eventually giving the animal a solved cube. Stomatopods are fastidious housekeepers and when it decided there was no food to be had from this cube, it threw it out. Add in some close-ups of the animal cleaning its eyes ("head-scratching"), and you have a cllip that depicts the "amazing mantis shrimp".

I think most of the versions of Fastest Claw floating around do not have the teaser, but I can't remember for sure.

Roy
 
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