Manny the Praying Mantis

By Chris Dietel • Photos by the author

One spring and summer I had fun learning about mantids, which are also called praying mantises. In early May I bought a mantid egg case at a garden shop. Gardeners buy the egg cases because young mantids, after they hatch, will eat grasshoppers, caterpillars, and other insects that eat plants.

I didn’t think I would be lucky enough to see the mantids come out, but one morning I checked the egg case, and . . . they were hatching! After only twenty minutes the young mantids were crawling around.

 

 

 

I set the mantids free in my backyard, and I was surprised when spiders and ants immediately attacked them. Because there are so many mantids, at least some of them survive to become adults and have young of their own.

After an hour, I could still see many of the mantids hiding among leaves and grass. Amazingly, their color had already begun to darken and become greener. Now they blended into their surroundings, which gave them some protection from predators.

Two weeks later I found two of the growing mantids in tall grass. One captured a smaller bug, called a leafhopper, and munched it down.

 

After two more months, in early August, a three-inch-long mantid peered at me through the leaves of a mint plant. I guessed it was one of the males, which are slightly smaller than females. I called him Manny. When Manny was not using his forelegs, he held them together in front of his body as if he were praying. In fact, that’s why this type of insect is called the praying mantid.

The mint plant was the perfect home and hiding place for Manny because it attracted many different kinds of bugs. When a bug came along, Manny snatched his prey with his large, strong forelegs, which had sharp spines for grasping and holding. One morning I watched him catch and eat a jumping spider, a small butterfly, a big fly, a honeybee, and a yellow jacket!

After eating, Manny always cleaned his forelegs and feet. Sometimes he spent as long as fifteen minutes cleaning up after a meal.

 

By late September the flowers on the mint plant were gone. Bugs no longer seemed interested in the plant, and I didn’t see Manny anymore. Mantids die in autumn. The male is often eaten by the female, and she dies after laying her eggs. I hoped that Manny had found a mate and that she had left an egg case. And I hoped that I would see more mantids hatch the next spring.