Advice for a newbie with a marine tank

[reeferious]

easiest way to coax your shrimp out would be to dunk that rock into clubsoda, i'll bet you that shrimp would fly out of his hidey hole and this way you wont have to soak your rock too long as in dunking into pure fresh water. save you all those life on liverock.

[Martmanicus]

I found a great reference site for just this thing
http://ozreef.org/library/articles/mantis_shrimp.html

Wow you know he's attacking every snail in site. I moved a bunch of snails off that piece of rock and yet I can still here him every minute or so whacking something else. Violent little buggers. Yeah I read that club soda is some kind of awful for them.

I don't want to kill him but I"m afraid I don't have much choice as I don't have a sump and I'm sure nobody wants to come pick up a homicidal mantis from downtown Vancouver

I don't know what type of crabs they are. It's Indonesian rock appearantly. The crabs are also hiding out in a bunch of holes. I piked several pieces of live rock that are riddled with caves thinking they looked interesting. After reading about mantis shrimp I think that all the caves have been dug out by them. Hopefully there is only one of them in my tank.

So after I'm done I'm just going to rebuild my aquascape ontop of the sand. Is this a bad idea? I don't want to disturb the sand too much as it took quite awhile for the cloudyness to go away and I can't drain my tank this time.

[landshark]

When I build my structures, I lay down small pieces of flat live rock or plastic as a makeshift footing for the bigger pieces. I try to use pieces that are same or slightly shorter than the height of your sand, (while laying directly on the glass bottom). This supports the first layer of your liverock at the height of your sand. This allows any sand sifting or burrowing fish or critters to easily tunnel under the rock and not disturb the supports that are holding up your display. I've never had any problems doing this and it is easy to do with sand allready in the tank.