I was out tonight cleaning the pond. Chopping up my super-long anarchis and hornwort, and getting excited by all the baby snails I'm finding. I probably found around 8 new snails--babies of the ones I bought and want in there! Woohoo! Anyway, while taking the bits of leaves and algea to the compost pile, I notice a stray leaf on my shoulder. I went to brush it off and it ran towards my head!! I grabbed it and threw it to the ground. I saw it was a praying mantis and scooped the poor thing up (boy was he angry) and took him in too show my husband. Well, while showing Adam, the thing ran up my arm, onto my back and into my hair.
As Adam was taking the picture, the mantis jumped at him and he screamed like a little girl and ran away from me! It was so funny. Every time the bug moved he'd be screaming and running.
I had one living in my plant pot last week.....I went to grab him thinking he was a leaf or something and it moved. Are they endangered????? I see those walking stick bugs once in a while too.
I don't think that they are endangered. We have a cool brown spotted one that lives on our enclosed porch. Every now and again we see him climbing around, doing his little boxing move at us.
Those are fantastic pictures of a very interesting creature!
We used to find them much more often when we were kids, but I also remember being told way back then that they were an endangered species. Maybe the population came back and they were taken off the list?
I did some research on it and most sources said that they've never been on the endangered species list, just that it is largely rumored to be (but actually isn't). That is quite a rumor and I wonder who started it.
Maybe they are making a come back cuz I've recently started seeing them in my yard and they havent been around in years. We have had an unusual amount of rain recently and I wondered if they were as a result of the waters. In any case, I'm glad they are around cuz that same water has caused an over abundance of skeeters and ants. I hope the mantises,...manti (plural ?) do stay around cuz I need help getting rid of these pesky bugs.
Im keeping my fingers crossed that we get back lighting bugs and horned toads which have disappeared from our area too.
I just found a female in my greenhouse, presumably looking for a spot to lay her eggs. I have seen only one other one this year, a green one - the male. Since I too thought they were absent for such a long time I did some research. They are a very beneficial insect but apparently they are extremely canabalistic, so much so that the female lays her eggs where they will be scattered by the breeze as they hatch because the young will feed on each other and reduce there own numbers! I am going to go and see if I can find the site where I read that info.
How can you tell the sex of the mantis? I love most bugs (except wasps/hornets and spiders) and mantis's have got to be my favorite. We've had an exeptionally wet year also. This spring my obedient plants were literally crawling with baby mantises. There were probably 40 or 50 of them!
Well apparently I have been wrong in my thinking all these years. I had always assumed that brown mantid were female and green were male??? Apparently you are supposed to count parts on them to determine the sex. I found an awesome site that deals with all kinds of bugs though and their section on praying mantis was very informative - what's that bug . com
Gardening in March
Gardening in April
Gardening in May
Shop at Amazon and Support AGF
Are you shopping online? Click this link first and A Gardeners Forum will receive a commission for your
referral at Amazon.com (shopping through this link to Amazon will not have any impact on your prices at Amazon).