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Before he became a Gulf Coast fishing guide, James Sanchez endured a painful rite of passage. “I was about eleven years old, and my dad and I were fishing in Port Aransas, at one of the piers off the ship channel,” he recalls. They were casting at the height of the fall flounder and bull redfish runs, using shrimp for bait. Sanchez reached down into the bait bucket, “and I felt something kick hard against my hand.” He recoiled in pain, thinking, “Man, that was a big shrimp!” Sanchez had encountered one of Texas’s fiercest invertebrates, the mantis shrimp (which, confusingly, is neither a mantis nor a shrimp). The many Texans who use the predatory crustacean as live bait know it by another name: the…

The post Beware the Mighty Mantis Shrimp appeared first on Texas Monthly.

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