[untamed]

I fired the opening salvo in my attack on ciranolids tonight.

I made a small trap from a 300ml water bottle. I'll post a photo some other time because I've been staring into a dark tank for hours and I'm tired.

I dropped the trap in just as the lights went off for the evening. The trap was baited with some pieces of krill. I sat in the dark trying to see into the tank and waited....Right on schedule, (about 1/2 hr later) I could see a ciranolid doing circles around my trap. I watched the circling for about 5 minutes and decided to lay the trap on it's side, rather than standing straight up. The ciranolid didn't like to swim too far away from the sand bed.

30 seconds after doing that, I had him! My first capture!

I watched him to ensure he wasn't trying to escape the trap. No..he just settled in for a meal. So I waited another 45 minutes to see if I could get another one. Nothing...

So, I decided I would ensure 1 kill for the evening and pulled up the trap to extract my prize. Upon inspection, it turns out that I had trapped approximately 25 ciranolids, mostly less than 1/2mm in size...plus one 5mm monster.

Have you ever crunched one of those large, black carpenter ants with your fingernail...? Same kind of noise. Very satisfying.

A quick reset and the trap went back in for the night. We'll see how we've done by morning.

Tomorrow, there will be 3 or more traps. I'm now confident that this war can be won!