[Fish]

Ike hadn't been fed for a few days and was getting hungry so yesterday I picked up 5 small hermit crabs and dropped them into the tank. Ike grabbed one right away and pulled it into his cave but after only a couple hits, he was already back out grabbing the next one. Before I knew it, all but one (one got away) were gone. I looked inside his cave and saw that all four hermit crabs were placed side by side upside down so that their openings were facing up instead of down. Ike was hanging motionless from the ceiling and staring right inside the shell openings. It looked like he was just waiting for one of the hermit crabs to come out and try and right itself. I watched this for about a minute and Ike was perfectly still the whole time. I couldn't stick around because I had to get home but I am looking forward to what I find when I get back on Monday.

At first I thought that Ike was too lazy to do any smashing and was just going to wait them out. After I posted in the mantis forum on Reef Central, another g. smithii keeper told me that he just observed the same thing when he put 10 blue legs in his tank. That got me thinking about a possible explaination for this behavior. 10 blue legs is a lot to feed, and 5 is the most that I have ever put in the tank at one time...
Perhaps this is a "food storage" mechanism that the mantis has developed. When I feed him a couple crabs, he busts them open and eats them. Maybe when you feed them more crabs than they can eat at once, they imobilize them on their backs to keep them until it is time to eat again. Maybe in the ocean, if they let a meal get away just because they weren't hungry at the time, they wouldn't be able to guarantee when the next meal would come along...
What do you think, does that sound possible?

- Chad