Peacock Mantis Shrimp

Care at a glance

Overview

Not reef safe and not community safe. This is a solitary ambush predator that will kill and eat snails, crabs, hermit crabs, and clams, take down fish it can subdue, and treat any other shrimp as competition or lunch. It genuinely needs a species only tank, ideally acrylic rather than glass, since a solid hit from its claw can crack a glass panel. Give it a deep sand bed to burrow in and a varied diet of live and frozen meaty foods like clams, mussels, and shrimp. Territorial and sharp enough that many keepers say it learns to recognize them at feeding time.

In the wild

Found across the Indo-West Pacific, from East Africa and the Red Sea to the Great Barrier Reef, the Philippines, and Indonesia, on sand and rubble bottoms near reefs where it digs a burrow. In the home aquarium it needs its own species only setup with a deep sand bed and rockwork it can dig under and claim.

Good to know

One of the largest and most colorful 'smasher' mantis shrimp, using a pair of club shaped raptorial appendages to deliver one of the fastest strikes of any animal, clocked at over 50 mph (80 km/h) and hard enough to crack open shells, or an aquarium glass panel. Its compound eyes track prey independently of each other and see a far wider range of color and polarized light than human eyes do.

Did you know

Its electric blue, green, orange, and red coloring is some of the most vivid in the animal kingdom, and its claw strike has earned it the nickname 'thumb splitter' among divers and keepers who have been on the receiving end.