Very little has been done in terms of research on the development of reproductive behaviors in stomatopods; indeed, many of them seem to be instinctive.  It might be possible to observe mating of lab-reared stomatopods and see how the mating systems develop, and whether a male (or female) learns from a member of the other sex or not as mating seasons pass.   One such experiment might go like this:

• Create an ethogram, or descriptive list of behaviors, by observing captive wild-caught stomatopods
• Take first-generation lab-reared stomatopods (mostly so that their age is known without sacrificing too much of the natural variation among the population). 
• Once they achieve sexual maturity, randomly pair males and females, and observe both sexes.  Compare their behaviors.  Repeat every month (assuming a month-long mating cycle, as is the case in some stomatopods; if the species being worked with has a different mating cycle, repeat once per mating cycle). 
• Compare behaviors for each stomatopod across mating seasons (and possibly across years, if enough cycles are sampled). 

Since stomatopods, along with the vast majority of marine invertebrates, spend the majority of their early years in the plankton, any study of learned reproductive behavior would have to wait until they become juveniles.  However, the planktonic lifestyle negates most possibilities of learning from their mother ("most" only because young stomatopods spend some time in the burrow with their mother)[12]. 

© 2012 Brendan Kohrn, Reed College