Doing my first saltwater tank....Mantis Shrimp

C

chasewayne

I'm putting together my first saltwater tank... My roommate has been educating me on them. I will be using epoxy for the rocks and pcv for the borrow plus putting plexiglass at the bottom. I'm wanting to do coral should i be fine or do i need to stick to pacific type of coral?
 
I am assuming that since you know what a mantis shrimp is that you've done some research on them. In fact have you seen the youtube videos? Some of them were pretty friggin cool. I'm not too sure what corals would be ok but I am sure someone around here will chime in.

What kind of mantis shrimp are you getting?
 
29 gallon nano..... The guys at the The Fish Gallery told me that a peacock would be fine in a 10 gallon... What size should one be in I havee seen a bunch of them in nano's... Unless they are diff types
 
@chasewayne wrote:
The guys at the The Fish Gallery told me that a peacock would be fine in a 10 gallon.. said:
Absolutely not. A "peacock" (O. scyllarus) is way too large for a 10 gallon. Peacock is a general name for colored mantis shrimps but usually the O. scyllarus is the one that is called a peacock. IMO a 29 is pushing it. I wouldn't keep one in anything smaller than that. You have to include also that you will need a deep, rubbly sandbed which will take up a lot of your water volume. 40 gallon breeders are perfect for O. scyllarus. That's not saying that you couldn't keep a nice mantis in a 29 or even a 10 but you need to research which mantis you are getting before you buy one. There are many different species and different requirements for all of them.

This is a good place to start,

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/arthropoda/crustacea/malacostraca/eumalacostraca/royslist/index.html#directory

Good luck!

Edit: Another thing I forgot to add was that O. scyllarus, and a few other species, are prone to shell rot which can be caused by too much lighting. Keeping corals with certain species of stomatopods isn't a good idea. There are several though that will tolerate high lighting. The "peacock" is not one of them.
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I think a Gonodactylellus viridis would be great for a 29g. I've also wanted one. I have a Gonodactylellus ternatensis
 
N. wennerae, O. havanensis, G. Smithii, would be great for a 29. O. havanensis is more difficult because it needs very stable parameters. G. Smithii would be the ideal mantis, colorful, interactive, hardy but they have become hard to come by. N. wennerae would be the easiest/cheapest to get and the most hardy but not as colorful as the others listed. I have a small N. wennerae that is awesome and interactive. I've owned a few different ones and this is my favorite.

Sorry if the link doesn't work, I'm on my phone. U can look the video up on youtube and I have some videos of my peacock too. I've had two peacocks and neither has lived past six months. There are not a lot of success stories with the O. scyllarus that I can find but man they are amazing to watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVZu1UCZzUI&feature=youtube_gdata_player
 
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