Juvenile O. Hav questions.
 

Does the behavior of juvenile O. Hav differ much from that of adults?

I have had one that is less than 1 inch for about a month now and it is much more reclusive than my past havanensis which was about 2 inches. He also does not seem to close his burrow at night.

What would be a good diet for him? I do not know what kind of live food I could possibly feed him. I have been feeding florida shrimp soaked in selcon and he always accepts this but recently has been throwing the food outside of his burrow after a few minutes.

Try small ghost shrimp and live brine if nothing else

I've had good luck with live large adult brine shrimp that have been treated with Selcon. However I keep the animals in plastic 1 gal. tubs that are not circulating. I add 20-30 brine shrimp and give them more if they eat these in an hour for two. The water is then changed in the afternoon. We keep 30 or so stomatopods like this and some have been in the lab for 5 years.. Bigger animals are kept in recirculating aquaria and are fed grass shrimp, snails, hermits and crabs.

Roy

I don't trust myself enough with such a sensitive species to do that! He does seem to be very receptive to just about any seafood i soak in Selcon for him. I will just keep it varied.

I can only get away with it because we use artificial sea water and change the water every other day 4 hours after feeding. Because we use only freshly mixed seawater, all parameters are good. Even one scrap of uneaten food left in the container can be fatal. That is one reason I like to feed live food like mysids and grass shrimp. It doesn't rot.

Most of the deaths that I have had with O. havanensis were due to low oxygen and jumping. These are really hyper little guys. Interestingly,, they have an unusual protective behavior when a predator tries to dig them out of their burrow. They play possum, rolling into a tight ball like a pill bug. Weh i first started collecting them, I would dig up the burrow and not find the animal even though I saw it in the burrow before starting to dig. Eventually I figured out that when the burrow was disturbed, the stomatopod would rollinto a tight ball and was very hard to find in the loose sand when the burrow collapsed. If I waited quietly for a few minutes, they would unroll and dig to the surface.