Mantis Shrimp

How long can a Mantis survive out of water? Three days I've been trying to catch this critter.Ready to remove all LR for 3-4 hours hoping that will do the trick please advise.

 

Hevgotdat4u
not sure but the irony would be it could survive longer than your bacteria can - so taking all your rock out may not be a good idea , you may succeed in killing the mantis and end up killing the other things you where trying to protect from it

if you can ID an individual rock it resides in, removing that rock and blasting it with a power head in a bucket of tank water may dislodge it

you could place food in a hole in a easy to remove rock to encourage the mantis to reside in that rock

you could try a trap also -Aquamedics trapest - is not bad for cathing these nuisance critters

Steve

 

Mantis shrimps are tough to catch. Once you try to catch one with a particular method, and fail, you'll be amazed by how smart they are in avoiding the same method again in the future.

I posted a nice way to grab a mantis shrimp in this thread ...

http://www.3reef.com/forums/inverts/bristleworm-trap-51775-2.html#post480507

Good luck!