Has anyone caught a mantis shrimp?

[Jason1234]

I hear 2 clicks in my tank sometimes. I think I have not lost any clean up crew. I don't know if I have one I can't see it at least. but it could be deap in the rocks. Does anyone know how to catch it?

[noahm]

It may just be a pistol shrimp if you haven't seen any evidence of hermit/snail loss. Otherwise, there are several common DIY traps. If you know which rock it is, you can take it out and put it in a bucket of fresh or any number of other torturous things. I have caught mine w/traps and also chasing them out the hole into a tube by blowing air into another part of the hole.

I would ignore it as a pistol shrimp unless you can verify otherwise. The battle will destroy your sanity if you choose that route.... :)

[plancton]

I´ve never captured mines with traps. When you redo the rockwork they start comming out to change homes, that´s why when the tank was new I removed 3 of them. Literally easy when you see where they hide, just take the rock out and maybe they will jump out or else dip it in freshwater.

After the initial removal, there were some mantis left, One of them became a real threat, killed 5 fish in total, including a small lemon peel tang. I was going crazy and one day I introduced a couple of banded shirmp, they were happy together and the third day I saw the attack in daylight, the mantis attacked the big one and dragged it to its cave, really brutal, so I broke my reef appart and started to see how the mantis became more active (like I said they become more visible when you redo the rock work).

And found the dead banded shrimp and used it as bait. The mantis actually came back to get it infront of my eyes, so after a couple of crazy hours and breaking the reef appart I took a rock out and it fell out, then I killed it as it was to dangerous to be left alive.

A week after that I continue hearing clicking noises, as if there´s still one left, but if there´s one left it has proven to be very docil and hasn´t attacked anything.

Anyways if you can´t capture a mantis and you don´t want your fish to get killed then you´re gonna have to offer cleanup crew in sacrifice.

[the droob]

The last mantis I had would start to click as soon as the lights went off.Beast of a thing took nealy all my fish at the time so we sat patiently with a torch in the dark looking every now and then to see which rock he was in.Once we had the right rock we pulled it out and sat it on the kitchen bench after emptying all the trapped water,it only took a few minutes and he dropped from his hole and met his maker,we then fed him back to the remaining fish,payback for the carnage he did to my fish stocks:lol: