My new 2.5g Mantis Tank

[Anonymous]

Well here it is so far! I just set it up this weekend. It's the standard AGA2.5 shoebox, soon to be home to my Neogonodactylus wennerae (I think I got someone lined up to send me one that they got in some TBS LR).

• Filled it with only rubble rock
• right now it's got a shatty "hood" ... it's a 32w smartlite (overkill!) in a fixture that normally fits on a 5.5g AGA ... it's all I had lying around and I'm still shopping for a good hood / canopy deal ... I might order one of those really nice custom wood ones
• I put some pulsing xenia in there, more because I wanted it out of my Nanocube ... that stuff spreads faster than calupera even!
• a small emerald crab stowed away. I named him "appetizer"
• The substrate is a really fine soft material about the same size as southdown sand that ppl wig out about ... but it's calcified! yay for my LFS that carries weirdo products!
• I plan to put shrooms and stuff in there, just softies etc ... see if the mantis leaves them alone.
• I had a whisper HOB Economy (smallest) filter but it was so overpowered it made drifts in the substrate! I found this tiny tiny RedSea HOB filter and it FARKING ROCKS THE SPOT TWICE BACKWARDS. I want to have an army of nanos equipped with an army of these itty bitty little HOB filters. Here's a link:
http://www.bigalsonline.com/catalog/pro ... 885;pcid2=


Welp, feast on this:

 

[Anonymous]

Very cute so far.

Expect Mr. Greenie to be Mantis luch the day you put your stomatopod in though

They don't bother corals at all, FWIW. We actually have a nice sized one (probly around the size of a Twix bar) in our 135 gallon reef tank. It's been there for years, along with a royal gramma pair, clown pair, a bicolor angel, 3 tangs, a ton of soft corals, some large snails, and two coral banded shrimp. It sort of defies the common logic of what mantises are supposed to do in reef tanks.

 

[Anonymous]

Weird.

Well, I'm hoping my mantis lives up to the reputation

 

[Anonymous]

Good looking tank. That xenia is gonna spread like madhouse with that much light.

I had my mantis in a 4 gal cube I built (10x10x10). when that started leaking, I bought a 7 bow.

I put three domino damsels in with it. I figured why not put some mean fishin with a mean shrimp. Then I had 2.

THen I had one.

Then they all disappeared!

I used to put a small piece of shrimp on the end of a planting stick. (the long ones with a fork at the end.) The mantis would come out of nowhere and attack the shrimp. You could feel the strike from the mantis the whole way up the stick.

After I showed my roomate him eating, She had nightmares the thing was comming after her!

B

 

[Anonymous]

Yeah my friends already want to order mantis' and have them cockfight. lol.

 

[Anonymous]

lol...you better go underground... you can say good bye to your emerald crab...

 

[danmhippo]

Wonder if the softies overrun the tank, will you have to put on a stainless steel gloves to clean up in a tank that size?

 

[Anonymous]

LordNikon, I named him "appetizer"

 

[Anonymous]

would ourderve be a nickname then? (however its spelled?)