Quintin
Active Member
lol, love your very descriptive story.
Yes, Wen and the team do a great job at collecting awesome looking rock full of life.
It’s probably my fault as I asked for rock with lots of crevices and stuff. So there is no way everything could have been removed before hand.
Will take some pictures and post it.
The big mantis I saw lives under the big base rock and suspect it’s got a buddy. Unless I’m going colour blind I’m sure I saw a yellow one and then a dark brown red one.
Another has setup a hole right in front of the tank and so tiny, that I wouldn’t have seen it, if it wasn’t for the tank magnifying glass.
Was showing the wife a decorator crab and this guy popped into view - unmistakable mantis eyes.
Closer inspection of the tank before dark revealed numerous ranging in size and colour.
Some yellow, others red brown and some green of which most are an inch or less.
CMMorgan
Counting my blessings...
Yep
CMMorgan
Counting my blessings...
You may want more than one trap. If I do get a cool little mantis, I'll set up a little tank for it. (shhh... don't tell my husband) I love going out to Cayo Costa and hearing them clicking in the mangroves. I'm going to cross my fingers and burn some sage or something though. I do not want to be chasing an octopus.
Quintin
Active Member
lol, if you are in the Lake Mary area you are welcome to pop in and collect whatever falls off the rock.You may want more than one trap. If I do get a cool little mantis, I'll set up a little tank for it. (shhh... don't tell my husband) I love going out to Cayo Costa and hearing them clicking in the mangroves. I'm going to cross my fingers and burn some sage or something though. I do not want to be chasing an octopus.
First I'll say - I wouldn't do it any other way..... I love my TBS rock and Sand. I ordered 100lbs of rock and 170lbs of sand.
I got 'lucky' with gorilla crabs, whelks, an octopus, mantis shrimp and I'm sure those parasitic isopods with the big eyeballs.
Luckily this was a part of a tank upgrade, so I was able to let the TBS rock sit in the new tank for a while allowing me to pick out more than 30 gorilla crabs and countless whelks. I also believe this fallow period gave the isopods a chance to die off before I transferred my fish.
With that said, just last week I think I caught my last gorilla crab - who I named Crabzilla. He is HUGE. What's crazy though, as I was looking for gorilla crabs, I ended up finding what I believe is a pistol shrimp. It has been 7 months since the rock has been in the upgraded tank and never saw it before. I find that insane.
Grand total of Gorilla crabs was well over 40. I made a neat little trap that worked wonderfully. I am however still picking out the whelks.
The bad guys are certainly real, but I am still in the camp of the good outweighs the bad.
I got 'lucky' with gorilla crabs, whelks, an octopus, mantis shrimp and I'm sure those parasitic isopods with the big eyeballs.
Luckily this was a part of a tank upgrade, so I was able to let the TBS rock sit in the new tank for a while allowing me to pick out more than 30 gorilla crabs and countless whelks. I also believe this fallow period gave the isopods a chance to die off before I transferred my fish.
With that said, just last week I think I caught my last gorilla crab - who I named Crabzilla. He is HUGE. What's crazy though, as I was looking for gorilla crabs, I ended up finding what I believe is a pistol shrimp. It has been 7 months since the rock has been in the upgraded tank and never saw it before. I find that insane.
Grand total of Gorilla crabs was well over 40. I made a neat little trap that worked wonderfully. I am however still picking out the whelks.
The bad guys are certainly real, but I am still in the camp of the good outweighs the bad.
Quintin
Active Member
Octopus was pure luck.
Previous experience with setting up tanks using live rock is to leave the rock out of water for 10 minutes and see what falls off.
That usually does the trick and enough to get most nasty things off close to the surface.
Was the first rock we pulled out of the box and let stand and the octopus crawled out of a tiny crevice. My daughter actually saw it and called me over. Then it was a frantic rush to get a bucket and add some water back to the bag to move the octopus for a donation to someone.
Yeah, releasing wildlife after it has been in an aquarium is generally illegal and frowned upon because it can cause some major problems (it doesn't always, but it can):
CMMorgan
Counting my blessings...
Well I'm going to have to disagree with you here. It came from Tampa Bay and it was returned back to the Tampa Bay about a week later. It's not an invasive species, as that is exactly where it is native. I live in the vicinity of TBS. It's not like it was shipped to me across the country and I introduced it to a new ecosystem. We just brought it back home, which is what we will do with any further TBS hitchhikers we come across.
The issue isn't with the hitchhikers from TBS in this case (as you mentioned, no risk of invasive species when the species is native to the area), it's with anything in the tank that's not native to the Tampa Bay Area - any corals, fish, inverts, macro, etc. in the tank that are from different areas (like the Indo-Pacific) which the hitchhikers are exposed to pose a potential pathogen issue for native wildlife; that's a big part of why it's generally illegal to release them.
Chances of introducing a non-native pathogen are low, but not zero.
Do you have a strategy to catch gorilla crabs? I can't believe how many I ended up with. I thought I had them all in the first few weeks and it turned out that was just the beginning...
Quintin
Active Member
I’m debating doing a hyper salinity dip this weekend but don’t want to shoot myself in the foot by removing both friend and foe from the rock.
I have so many good things on the rock that really come alive at night, it would be a real shame to loose all of that.
So still up in the air on what to do.
Get a six line wrasse to catch and eat the small ones or perhaps a copper band?
Else it may be bottle traps but you never gonna get them all.
Most nights after lights out, I spend about an hour with a red torch removing things - plenty of whelks, some Eunice worms, got a couple of crabs but even the really small ones hold on for dear life it’s nearly impossible to catch them.
As for the possible octopi running around.
You never gonna see any of them until they quite a lot bigger and can do some serious damage.
Bottle traps all worked for me. It might take a few days, but beats a year of dino and hair algae. Put a handful of them in there - start drinking some soda. 
If you are a super savage, you don't have to catch hairy crabs to take care of them. People used to use drill bit down the hiding hole all of the time. Some of those crabs will be dead of old age in a month or two - some can live about three years. Most are not harmful but some are. Nearly none of them are coral eaters by nature, but they will totally eat coral if there is nothing else for them to eat - they won't live on poop and detritus just like neither you nor I would either.
If you don't want do deal with most of this, then have them ship the rocks in newspaper... the crabs and shrimp all crawl out and die. Most of the stuff that you want on the rock lives just fine - corals do not, though.
If you are a super savage, you don't have to catch hairy crabs to take care of them. People used to use drill bit down the hiding hole all of the time. Some of those crabs will be dead of old age in a month or two - some can live about three years. Most are not harmful but some are. Nearly none of them are coral eaters by nature, but they will totally eat coral if there is nothing else for them to eat - they won't live on poop and detritus just like neither you nor I would either.
If you don't want do deal with most of this, then have them ship the rocks in newspaper... the crabs and shrimp all crawl out and die. Most of the stuff that you want on the rock lives just fine - corals do not, though.
d2mini
5000 Club Member
LOL, i just wanted to say that good or bad, that is quite impressive!
I've set up a bunch of tanks from large to small with TBS rock. Some rock that was fairly new/young and other rock that had been down there for many years. Small pieces to almost boulder sized. I've had a range of critters, the worst was a large stone crab. I've had my share of mantis, but even on the biggest tank with the oldest rock, i still only had 3. Never even knew there were octopus!
I'm sorry I can't answer your question since I've never been in this situation but wow. Super interesting. Hopefully you can at least knock down the mantis population with some suggestions here. Whelks you can pull out when you see them, same for gorillas, isopods will age out rather quickly. I have a mantis in my current tank, just the one as far as i've seen, and in the more than 1 year that I've had the tank running, this is the first time that a mantis hasn't come fully out looking for food, allowing me to grab him. That little sucker is just continuing to enjoy the free escargot!
Quintin
Active Member
Yup, caught one of them giving my stylophora tester a hair cut. Managed to take him out pretty easily. Have a pair of 22” tweezers I use for that job.
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