New to fishkeeping, got a Peacock Mantis Shrimp on the way :)

[nmotz]

I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but based on the video I'd say you might want to plus up on the burrow diameter. You look to have a full grown Peacock mantis and they are a bit on the chunky side when full grown.

The pipe is fine right now, but when he molts he'll have to jackknife inside the pipe and if he can't he will get stuck inside the old shell and die. I checked and see that 68mm is about 2.67 inches and even that might not be enough. I'd recommend a 3" (~76mm) pipe diameter for a full grown Peacock. He will fill the interior with gravel and rock to suit him if it's too spacious.

I'm sorry, I know that's a ton of work to rip out and replace PVC. Otherwise all looks good man, enjoy!

 

[wwarby]

I'm a bit late to the party on this one, but based on the video I'd say you might want to plus up on the burrow diameter. You look to have a full grown Peacock mantis and they are a bit on the chunky side when full grown.

The pipe is fine right now, but when he molts he'll have to jackknife inside the pipe and if he can't he will get stuck inside the old shell and die. I checked and see that 68mm is about 2.67 inches and even that might not be enough. I'd recommend a 3" (~76mm) pipe diameter for a full grown Peacock. He will fill the interior with gravel and rock to suit him if it's too spacious.

I'm sorry, I know that's a ton of work to rip out and replace PVC. Otherwise all looks good man, enjoy!

Urgh. All I can do at the moment is hope it won’t be a problem in the short term. Oatmeal definitely likes the burrow - she spends most of her time in it, although she does occasionally give it a whack from the inside - not sure if that’s normal behaviour or if she’s trying to make it bigger because it’s too small.

The one saving grace is I have a T junction in the pipe work because I made three entrances to the burrow. I’m pretty sure she’s capable of using the T junction to turn around because I’ve seen her go in and out of the same entrance head first.

If I really do need to change the pipe diameter it’s going to have to wait a while. I suspect a 3 inch pipe wouldn’t fit around my current aquascape so I would need to rip all the rock out and smash it apart and rebuild it, losing all the bacteria in the process. I think I’d really struggle to catch Oatmeal in a net, and my gut feeling is the risk of doing all that at this stage of my inexperience is probably worse than the risk of the smaller pipe diameter. I’ll keep a close eye on the situation though and change the pipe work as soon as I feel confident I can do it without causing a disaster.

 

[wwarby]

Update: after a lot of thinking I decided to change things up a bit. @nmotz was right about the burrow being too small, it was obvious that Oatmeal didn't like it when she was getting ready to molt because she was hammering incessantly on the edge of the plastic burrow trying to make it bigger for three straight days. More importantly I was getting frustrated with my tank because it's relatively huge for a mantis shrimp (240 litres, 64 US gallons in the display) and she'd shown enough aggression torwards my clown fish (safely returned to the LFS) that I dared not try any other fish without at least having a second tank to quickly rescue them to at the first sign of trouble.

Long story short, I'm currently building out a second tank - a RedSea Max Peninsula 100 litre, which is going to be Oatmeal's new home. I've started a member tank thread for the new build if anyone is interested in following along.