A year ago, I was walking in a park. I found a bush, and wanted to explore it, to find life. I looked in every area of the bush: inside it, outside of it, the left side, and the right side, and every bush around it. Finally, I found a Chinese mantis egg. Then, near it, there was another. I wanted to hatch some mantids, so I took one home, and put it in a can outside.
Mantises starting to hatch (look! they are streaming out of the egg case), and one mantis is looking at the egg, because it is curious
Three months later, the mantids hatched! They where the size of my fingernail on my middle finger. They were so tiny and cute, and SO MANY of them! When they hatched, we put them in the spare Exoterra cage. We had to buy flies (drosophila melanogaster) quickly, so they don’t have time to eat each other.
This is the best mantis strike video I have! Hope you enjoy it! Does the video make you hungry?
The newly born mantises are very hungry. They are also curious, they go around the cage and explore. They love hunting! They only eat alive insects. If there is not enough food, they eat each other. So we had to release most of our mantises into the yard, so that they can survive and be useful. We have been rearing mantids for 3 years, and during this time they ate almost all the biting insects in our yard.
This one is eating a juicy fly. It just wants to eat more!!!! All it is focusing on is its food.
Baby mantises are like other babies: they have huge eyes and look like manga characters. Do you see the stripe along the face? It is so small!
They have about 3-4 molts before they become adults. I fed them fruit flies first, small crickets second, and gut loaded ones last. This is one of the juvenile mantises eating a gut-loaded cricket. It is so tasty! It did not have the last molt, and it did not grow wings yet.
Up close, it is so so so so so so so so so so so so so so CUTE! I think it is trying to eat the camera. This mantis was particularly friendly. It loved playing with people and watching the phone’s camera. When it grew to an adult, it bit me. It was not trying to hurt me, I think it was tasting me. I ended up with a small hole in my finger, but that healed well.
This mantis would often stand by the door of the cage when people were around and asking us to open the door by moving its pedipalps and rubbing its head against the glass. It wanted to be held. It was a very unusual mantis!
It looks like a stick! I think it is eating in a very funny way. You can see the jaws moving. You can see how powerful their jaws can be. Usually, the crickets are still alive and moving while mantises eat them (eww!).
This is it having its last molt! During the last molt, the mantids get their wings. After that they can fly! For the molt, they hang on the top of the cage for a long time, and slid out of their skin slooooooowly (you can see some skin examples in my collection).
Sometimes, the molt does not go very well and the wings come out crumpled. Here is one of our mantids that had crumpled wings. But they do not fly long distance and I don’t think it even noticed there was something wrong with them.
Chinese mantises are invasive species in the US, they come from China and Asia in general. It was accidentally introduced in the US in 1896 at a plant nursery somewhere around Philadelphia. They compete with the native Carolina mantises (see my blog about them) for habitat and food. See My Collection for the preserved Chinese mantises and to compare them to the Carolina mantis.
Hope you liked this post! The praying mantises are so elegant and beautiful!
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