I woke to find myself looking at a praying mantis. It was sitting on my bedside table, looking at me. This is not a common occurrence in England, we don't really do bugs of this kind. It was clearly a juvenile, an inch or so long. I wondered if it was hungry, as clearly it may not survive for more than five minutes, despite mantises having been in roughly their current form since the early Tertiary period, without my assistance.
I found a dead fly on the windowsill and put it near the mantis. I waited and watched, as did the mantis. I'm apparently not much suited to fieldwork as I grew bored after a half-hour of stubborn inactivity and went about other business. I thought, as mantises hunt by sight, the sight of me looking at it may be putting it off, so I left it to it.
When I returned it was holding the fly in both spiked, 'raptorial' forelegs and eating it as we would eat corn-on-the-cob. A
mantis will bite the head off a prey which struggles, but this one wasn't, so it was being eaten from the middle. The vast majority of predatory mantises engage in sexual cannibalism, the female bites off the head of the male during
copulation. The entomologist J. Henri Fabre notes the female 'with her muzzle turned over her shoulder continues very placidly to gnaw what remains of her swain'. The evolutionary benefit of this remains unclear, although it must work I suppose, or they wouldn't have evolved to do it.
2pm, 28 degrees
I found a dead fly on the windowsill and put it near the mantis. I waited and watched, as did the mantis. I'm apparently not much suited to fieldwork as I grew bored after a half-hour of stubborn inactivity and went about other business. I thought, as mantises hunt by sight, the sight of me looking at it may be putting it off, so I left it to it.
When I returned it was holding the fly in both spiked, 'raptorial' forelegs and eating it as we would eat corn-on-the-cob. A
mantis will bite the head off a prey which struggles, but this one wasn't, so it was being eaten from the middle. The vast majority of predatory mantises engage in sexual cannibalism, the female bites off the head of the male during
copulation. The entomologist J. Henri Fabre notes the female 'with her muzzle turned over her shoulder continues very placidly to gnaw what remains of her swain'. The evolutionary benefit of this remains unclear, although it must work I suppose, or they wouldn't have evolved to do it.
2pm, 28 degrees