wives' tale or not?

[liquidfluidity]

is it true that a smasher will loose his hammers if he is only fed prepared foods? mine seems happy just taking food off a scewer that i use to feed him. he will also eat snails. he won't touch crabs that have a hard exoskeloton but if it has a shell, it's lunch.

 

[Alex]

Yes it is true it happened to my first one. My new one I am making sure she gets snails and also letting her hit a tube I hold in my hand. Just make sure they are used on a regular basis. Also if there is a sudden change in water quality they might ripe the smashers off. They can regrow after 3-4 molts which might take up to a year otr more.

Alex

 

[kalim]

study

study

some researchers did a study once by offering stomatopods several diff kinds of food...they then graphed the number of times the mantis had to strike the armor of the prey to break it and get at the "meat" versus the total amount of nutritional value of a prey...

incredibly enough, they found that the two lines in a graph crossed at a certain point, specifying a particular #strikes to break and a specific "prey nutritional value"....

it turns out the mantis shrimps selected their prey based on getting the maximum amount of food, using the minimum number of strikes. smart critters.

in your case, i bet since it is well-fed, it does not bother with harder armored critters because it knows the effort to get at the meat is not worth it.

 

[liquidfluidity]

mantis smart food

mantis smart food

those stats are very interesting and the intellect of mantis is a lot greater than i knew. actually, i just started trying prepared foods in the last couple of days. he was just getting live food before and still wouldn't mess with some of the crabs i had put in as a food item. i do still plan on giving him a variety of live and prepared foods. do you think that at some point he will just quit taking the food that he has to work for?

 

[kalim]

LOL

LOL

LOL - i had one lazy bum awhile back (a peacock) who was so used to me giving a daily piece of shrimp that when i at last placed a live critter (crab) in with him, he just looked at it, then me, as if to say: "Are you going to peel that for me?"

when they're hungry, they'll HAVE to earn their meal.