you mostly only find them out in deep water (or so i am told) but i have caught a few hand fulls of them in all the years i used to trawl inshore for shrimp.

use them for bait by the oil rigs and you will have a fish before it hits the bottom, in inside waters i rarely use meat so i never used them there but they asre just a strange looking cousin of a shrimp

Had some in the shrimp brother gave me,they are not very good boiled, nothin in them . Maybe fried real crisp, would work.

go to youtube and enter Mantis Shrimp, watch what these things do to crabs and clams.

'Featherweight boxing. A maritime creature that is 4 inches long and more powerful than a point 22 calibre pistol. Big things certainly do come in small packages!

I saw those videos -- that is one bad shrimp!

My buddy ended up putting him on the hook on sunday. It caught one of the biggest trout of the weekend. Wish i could get a bucket full of them!

If you trawl in the gulf at night you are more likely to catch enough to use for bait. Great snapper bait. At the rigs I frequent, the snapper are always puking them up.

Be careful when handling mantis shrimp! I don't know what species is shown in the photo, but some of them pack a nasty punch while others have really sharp 'talons' to back up that punch that can split your thumb open.