Airlan Alan San Juan

The author of this site (A. San Juan) languishes in New Jersey, USA. He collected an M.S. in Plant Molecular Biology during the misspent days of his youth, then finally settled on an M.B.A. with specialization in Information Systems from Seton Hall University (Go Pirates!). He currently works on java apps, databases, and other geeky computer stuff, as well doing research on his favorite critters, leafcutter ants. In his spare time, he helps his wife grow her BPO, Call Center outsourcing and IT software business.

His likes include java (not the coffee, but the computer programming language), stomatopods, aroid plants, ants, science fiction (and especially Vernor Vinge's Zheng Ho series, Dan Simmons' Hyperion cantos, and works by the great British writer Iain Banks), and his wife (not necessarily in that order --- ouch!!! sorry dear!). He also loves travelling around the world with his wife, and especially exploring old ruins and tropical rainforests.

In addition to The Lurker's Guide to Stomatopods, he also maintains The Lurker's Guide to Leafcutter Ants, Istana Daun Kerengga, Pahatan Kehidupan, The Way of Simplicity, and Organisasi Bahasa Melayu di Bangsa Filipina

For some REALLY dense writing, try out his one and only submitted short fiction story, which was published by an online magazine in 1997 (and which ended up in that publication's Best Of list). Warning: a wee bit o' strong coffee may be necessary to get through some of the passages.

To contact by email: asjbiotek (at) gmail.com

Airlan San Juan

Situs penulis (A. San Juan) dari negeri Filipinas, tetapi sekarang tinggal New Jersey, USA. Dia mengumpulkan MS Biologi Molekular Tanaman dan juga MBA (System Informasi) dari Seton Hall University. Sekarang dia bekerja dengan Java, databases, dan lain-lain barang komputer.

Dia menjukai Java, stomatopods, tanaman aroids, semut-semut, fiksi ilmiah (dia mau buku-buku oleh Vernor Vinge, Dan Simmons, dan Iain Banks), dan isterinya. Dia memang mau juga membuat perjalanan ke mana-mana dengan isterinya!

Dia sedang belajar Bahasa Melayu, tetapi dapat juga mengerti Bahasa Filipino, Bahasa Ingeris, dan Bahasa Espanol. Dia menjukai Bahasa Melayu sebab tinggal di Surabaya, Indonesia pada tahun 1981 - senang sekali disana! Sayang, dia tidak dapat lama di Indonesia. Negeri itu ada banyak pemandangan bagus!

Dia menulis Pahatan Kehidupan, The Lurker's Guide to Stomatopods, The Lurker's Guide to Leafcutter Ants, Istana Daun Kerengga, The Way of Simplicity, dan Organisasi Bahasa Melayu di Bangsa Filipina.

Silakan masuk ke duniaku!

Email: asjbiotek (at) gmail.com

Wow! So much has happened the past year or so. We spent most of 2005 traveling, first to California for a family reunion, then to Florida for an International Aroid Organization meeting (and some beach time!), then off to Beijing, China and the Philippines at the end of the year.

I noticed my side interests undergo a regular cycling every year. At the end of the year and in the early part of every year, my interest is firmly on leafcutter ants (probably in response to the cold weather here in jersey), but by summertime my interest turns to aroids and other things.

My wife has started to grow her business tremendously the last year, and I have a feeling lots of good things are soon to come in this quarter.

Some people may be wondering why the Lurker's Guide to Stomatopods is not updated more often. Well, there are several reasons.

Rest assured though, that I will continue to keep this site up and updated semi-regularly in perpetuity for the benefit of all the new and old mantis lovers out there.

In the meantime, I'll be travelling to the Philippines this coming Fall 2004 - no leafcutters, but perhaps tons of other great adventures with the tropical wildlife over there!

We just got back from Puerto Vallarta in Mexico and I managed to do some research on the awesome leafcutter ant Atta mexicana. I must say that the area is incredibly beautiful, with tree-covered high mountains to one side, and the green-blue Pacific on the other. I've put up lots of new Quicktime videos in the Lurker's Guide to Leafcutters, and I just now put up absolutely cool pics of a stomatopod fluorescing by Dr. Roy Caldwell in the Lurker's Guide to Stomatopods.

Oh, yeah, didn't I warn you Bush was a nutcase? Let's get this guy out in 2004 before he turns the U.S.A. into some sort of police state (just take a look at all the violations of privacy and human rights now on the rise without a peep from the majority of people - even Amnesty International has warned about these abuses of power).

For those interested in ants, and especially leafcutter ants, I have created a new site called The Lurker's Guide to Leafcutter Ants which will focus on these fascinating critters!

Well, got back from Costa Rica, and WHAT A TRIP! The natural beauty of that place is overwhelming, AND I got some studies done as well in between beach trips and rainforest hikes. Here's one about leafcutters and army ants posted in the online journal Notes from Underground. Here's another study surveying the Attine population in the Nicoya peninsula.

Once in awhile, I gotta ask myself, WHY? Why do I like stomatopods? Why not harlequin shrimp, or octopus, or triggers?

After some thought, I figured I could break it up into several different reasons:

Busy as usual, which is as good an excuse as any for why I have not been updating the site regularly.

We'll be going to beautiful Costa Rica this coming November, so hopefully I'll have some stuff to publish (although it'll be more likely about ants than mantis shrimps).

I am back from a long hiatus...VERY busy times, what with the economy melting around us and several rounds of layoffs where i work. Was not affected, but it was traumatic anyway because several friends were let go...

Anyways, my wife and I spent our December holiday vacations in Mexico. We stayed at first in Cancun, and the beaches and sight were cool and everything, but the highlight of the trip was definitely when we went over to Merida and visited two of the Mayan ruins...all I can say is...wow! I could have spent forever just looking and exploring those magnificent ruins (Chichen Itza and Uxmal)....plus, there were tons of different ants around, especially leaf cutter ants, which have become my favorite ant.

Unfortunately, I only spent a day snorkeling, and so cannot report any sightings of stomatopods...but on the good side, i noticed that Dr. Caldwell over in the message board has posted some fascinating pictures of stomatopod matings during the holidays...hmmm...

Also, I have some stuff from Peter A. Ensminger's cool book "Life Under the Sun", which I've also seen in several bookstores and libraries around here...I'll post that later this week.

I gotta admit, I may be distracted by other things going on around me, so much so at times that this site can sometimes get downright "static", with updates coming in every month or so, but I always end up coming back and updating the place sooner or later --- whether it be with some newly-found awesome pic or some new funky link about mantis shrimps.

In this case, I had been coasting along, content to plaster an external link or two per month, when who else but the indefatigable Dr. Roy Caldwell emails me out of the blue with news about a just completed Aquarius mission that had focused exclusively on stomatopods! Talk about burgeoning popularity! Before you know it, National Geographic will just have to do a special on our beloved smashers and spearers!

So how's it going? Well, the U.S. economy (not to mention most everyone's 401k plan and stock portfolio) has gone the way of the HMS Titanic lately (that is, for those of you not in the know, all the way DOWN); Prez Bush is about the nuttiest head of state the US has had in awhile and keeps breaking promises made by the country to the rest of the world; and I personally devolved into a "car nut" after watching "Fast and Furious". For a while there, I seriously contemplated getting a Toyota MKIV Supra! Fortunately, my wife (who is more level-headed than I, and better looking to boot), conked me on the head and got any notions of THAT happening out faster than a speeding smasher's raptorial appendages...

BTW, before all else (including great stomatopod pics), I value information, so if you have something to contribute to our knowledge about mantis shrimps feel free to email me and i can "log" it here for others to appreciate and learn.

Anyways, hope you have a nice time visiting this site, courtesy of all the "stomatopod-nuts" (myself included) who have spent time and effort getting great pics and contributing to our knowledge about these fascinating creatures!

Just got back from Hawaii, and did some snorkeling over in Hanauma Bay in Oahu...Gorgeous scenery! The first time we had gone snorkeling in a coral reef, it was in Florida, far out from the beach, where large waves threatened to drown us from time to time and where the cold waters restricted swimming to minutes at a time...this Bay, on the other hand, was completely different! The coral reef literally starts at the beach area, and you can stand in the sand and actually see large fishes swimming around in the shallows!!! Very, Very NICE!

My wife and I spent an entire day futzing around the bay coral, disturbing schools of brightly-colored fish and me trying to catch some glimpse of some wayward stomatopod (no luck!). We did find an amazing looking octopus wedged inside a coral crevice...it looked all squishy, with a pulsating body that did NOT make it look cuddly at all. I come from a background of interest in arthropods (insects and ants), and my liking of stomatopods definitely is due to this background...soft, pulsating, amoeba-bodied things I'll leave to my nightmares, thank you.

So, you might ask, why the dearth of new updates? Unfortunately, I have again been busy with other stuff (this stomatopod site being just a side hobby of mine). However, I do keep my eyes open for new stomatopod information on the web, and I do get the occasional email from people who are involved in stomatopod related projects...

Three years is not that long in "real time", but is probably a lifetime in "internet time"...

In early 1998, the internet stock frenzy was yet to be and internet stocks were (as they should be, to be honest about it) still hovering in single digits; java applets still romped around to slow down everyone's browsers and server side applications were mostly perl scripts; homepages about everything and nothing at all were starting to become commonplace as the web expanded from being a tool of academia to an everyday phenomenon almost as prevalent as TV; and a guy toiling away at an MBA first heard the term "mantis shrimp".

In the beginning, the site consisted mostly of references to mantis shrimp in the literature, some care and pest instructions, and some pics and references contributed by Dr. Roy Caldwell (who continues to be THE stomatopod guy --- an all-around expert on the critters --- and one generous dude). Dr. Malcolm Burrow, who is one of the founders of modern stomatopod research, seeded the Biology section (which is THE most important part of this site) by allowing the site to use a diagram of a stomatopod raptorial appendage in Aspects of a Stomatopod Strike, and Shane Ahyong (who might have gotten his PhD since then,gotta check!) sent info on the new phylogeny of mantis shrimps and helped usher in the Taxonomy area.

Three years later, the site is still here and growing (thanks to all the contributors of pics and notes!), logging a couple of thousand hits a day (and for one memorable day in early January registering 23,000 hits and several thousand unique visitors in the space of a few hours -- not Amazon.com type numbers of course, but pretty ok for a site dedicated to a relatively obscure group of critters). Reef aquarists and divers by far make up the bulk of the visitors (as evidenced by the fact that About.com's Saltwater Aquarium Guide is the number one non-search-engine source of visitors), but more and more people are coming in through links from academic and other sites (most visitors of course come in through search engines).

In terms of accomplishing its purpose and goals, the site has probably been relatively successful in providing information on these interesting critters to curious visitors. For some people, at least, mantis shrimps are not simply mean and ugly ravagers of reef tanks...for some people, stomatopods are beautiful creatures who survey their environment through the animal world's most sophisticated eyes, and who wield one of nature's most effective and deadly creations, the stomatopod raptorial appendages.

Just a quick hello from the maintainer of this site.....and a fast look at what's been happening recently:

Just read this book by Jack Chalker ("Ghost of the Well of Souls"), one of the newer books based on his Well World series (which I loved when I was younger). The Well World was created by a master race long ago, then populated with all the different species that would be used to populate the actual universe. The world itself is very unusual. First of all, it is precisely divided in many hexagonal shaped "areas", each of which holds a single species, and each of which is supposed to approximate the conditions that that race may encounter in the outside world. More intriguingly, each "hex" is divided into 3 types: non-tech, where only muscle power can work; semi-tech , where various pre-industrial machines can work, but nothing more; and high-tech hexes, where anything can work....

Anyways, whereas his earlier Well books focused on intrigue and war between land-based hexes, his newer books focus on sea-based critters, and the main bad guys are based on squids and/or cuttlefish!!! Sorta interesting, but if Jack Chalker had ever heard of stomatopods, I am sure he would use these more intriguing crustaceans as characters in his plot....Mantis shrimps with laser pistols, how cool is that?

Incredibly enough, I'm set to graduate from Seton Hall.... how time flies! I still clearly remember starting this site more than a year ago, and now it's grown quite a bit, and must be the most comprehensive site on these critters in the net. I don't pretend to be an expert on mantis shrimps, but I must admit I have learned a lot just by maintaining the site and taking care of several stomatopods at home. And although my interests in them has occassionally taken a backseat to other things (eg. I am heavily into server-side java at work) I still try to take the time to visit a fish store or two once a month to see whether any new specimens have come in. I will be posting some pics from vintage Stomatopod magazines of yesteryear by next week, so check in frequently to see any updates....

Sorry for being gone for a month or so, but I had a lot of things to do for a while. In addition to being barraged by a battery of exams at Seton Hall (where I am an MIS-specializing MBA student--- an unusual greed + geek combination if there ever was one), I also work fulltime over at an AT&T facility in South Jersey, where I battle the Chaos of the Web daily and help build the company's intranets.

Fortunately, I may be able to update this site in a more regular fashion from now on. If you have any mantis shrimp info or stories, please feel free to continue to send them over to me.

I started this site a short while back (February 4,1998), and I had included here some "caveats" about the fact that I was a relative novice to the field of marine aquaria, and indeed to the subject of mantis shrimps as well. A month later, I've learned quite a lot more about both subjects, and I hope that fact shows in both the content of this site, and the way I handle questions from interested readers.

I am a MBA student at Seton Hall University, and I support this tortuous condition by helping to design and construct web sites. I had started writing SF recently, and my interest in the stomatopods occurred when I came across a post in one of the science fiction newsgroups about a book series called the Uplift War, where the main idea was that sentient species arise by being "uplifted" by already-sentient creatures. The discussion centered around which earth species should be uplifted by Man, and one poster had this one-word post that simply said: "Mantis shrimps."

I became curious as to why someone would mention a relatively unknown ( at least to me at the time) and curiously named creature....