mpatterson42
Well-Known Member
Aimee is a female orange meral mantis shrimp (gonodactylaceus glabrous). She's only about 2 inches long. Someone ordered a mantis shrimp at my local fish store almost a year ago and after she came in the person ghosted the store and never came back. She's been available for a while but my wife isn't a huge fan of mantis shrimp, I was finally able to convince her to let me get one on the condition I found an acrylic tank (she often punched the glass in the fish store).
I found someone selling this acrylic AIO DIY frag tank on Marketplace, it was pretty rough and I did my best to clean it up. It's not perfect (definitely some scratches that I didn't see that I wish I couldn't polished out a bit more) but I think it works! It's 24x24x12.
Unfortunately during the leak test I found that the AIO chamber was leaking so I used some acrylic cement to seal it. Always do a leak test!
Cleaned it up and set it on my desk in my office.
I cycled the tank with some various rocks I had lying around, including pukani, marco, and CaribSea as well as rubble rock from my established tank and some estalbished bio-spheres. Sand is Arag-Alive Special Grade along with a few pounds of crushed coral. Then I used Fritz TurboStart and Ammonium Chlorid and waited for the ammonia and nitrite to drop to 0.
She seems to have settled in nicely, I put a piece of pukani rock front and center hoping she would use it as her main lair and she spends most of her time hanging out there or in the marco rock next to it.
Return pump is an MightJet Mini. No wavemaker. I am planning on adding a light and macroalgae, but not sure if I'll do any coral (maybe some easy things like GSP).
I added an astrea snail and 3 hermit crabs. I actually saw her take the snail into her den and punch it, but after that the snail has been out and wandering about so I guess she couldn't crack the shell. She hasn't shown much interest in the hermits.
For feeding I offer thawed out frozen krill as well as pieces of shrimp, scallops, and silversides. He favorites so far seem to the shrimp and silversides. I'll often see her take the food from the tongs, go into her cave, then hurl the food out the back of her cave. She's very picky! I've also put a few saltwater ghost feeder shrimp in there but I'm not sure if she's eaten any of them.
