Peacock mantis shrimp

Care at a glance

Overview

The peacock mantis shrimp is an aggressive burrowing hunter that needs a saltwater tank of its own. It suits a keeper with a little experience.

Caring for the peacock mantis shrimp

Give a peacock mantis shrimp a species-only tank of at least 20 gal (75 L), ideally acrylic rather than glass. A solid hit from its claw can crack a glass panel. Add a deep sand bed to burrow in, and rockwork it can dig under and claim.

Keep the water at 75 to 81°F (24 to 27°C), with a pH of 8.1 to 8.4. Feed a varied diet of live and frozen meaty foods such as clams, mussels and shrimp. It is territorial and sharp, and many keepers say it learns to recognize them at feeding time.

It is not reef safe and not community safe, so keep one per tank. As a solitary ambush predator, it will kill and eat snails, crabs, hermit crabs and clams. It takes down fish it can subdue and treats any other shrimp as competition or lunch. Breeding it is hard.

Good to know

The peacock mantis shrimp is one of the largest and most colorful smasher mantis shrimp. Its electric blue, green, orange and red coloring is some of the most vivid in the animal kingdom. It uses a pair of club-shaped raptorial appendages to deliver one of the fastest strikes of any animal. The strike is clocked at over 50 mph (80 km/h) and hits hard enough to crack open shells. Its compound eyes track prey independently of each other. They see a far wider range of color and polarized light than human eyes do.

In the wild

The peacock mantis shrimp is found across the Indo-West Pacific. Its range runs from East Africa and the Red Sea to the Great Barrier Reef, the Philippines and Indonesia. It lives on sand and rubble bottoms near reefs, where it digs a burrow.

Common questions