Snail putting up quite a fight

I just got a mantis in my 10 gallon and its a pretty good size like 5 inches witch i got 4 days ago. the day i got it i fed it a snail from my reef andit went right for it... but its still trying to crack its shell it makes the snapping noise and all like my other 1 when it breaks stuff and i'm 100% shure it has 2 great raps. Why cant it crack the snail its still tryign to break it since 4 days ago the snail is about an inch. How long does urs take to crack a snail?
 
My turbos are getting huge so I thought I'd sacrifice one to my mantis. This turbo was VERY large so it took a day for the mantis to totally crack through the shell. My peacock mantis is pretty big, about 5."
 
A snail is not a snail. Some are incredibly armored and you would have a hard time breaking them with a hammer. The fact that stomatopods can break them as efficiently as they do is remarkable. We have done some work on breaking behavior and several factors are important beyond how tough the shell is.

First, and probably most important, the stomatopod needs an anvil against which to break the snail. If it has only sand or gravel, it cannot generate the impact required to crack the shell. With O. scyllarus that dig burrows, I usually supply a flat rock near the entrance of the burrow against which the animal can position the snail when attempting to open it. Gonodactylids such as N. wennerae that live in cavities don't have this problem.

Secondly, the stomatopods often have to learn how to open a snail morphology with which they have no experience. Eventually they will learn the weak spots to attack, but his can take days or even weeks.

Roy
 
.Dang straight Gono. It's all about physics. When you hit ball with a baseball bat, a large portion of that energy you just spent is used to cause the ball to go flying. A small portion of that energy is actually used to generate physical damage on that ball, and an even smaller portion to generate heat. But if you took that same ball and smacked it while it was against a wall, nearly all of that energy would be used to pulverize that ball. The same concept goes with the shrimp and the snail :p .
 
Back
Top