Religious Assassin

By Vannessa Peters - May 30, 2019

Religious Assassin

A Little Bit of Background

The Greek word mantikos stood for prophet or soothsayer, and that is where the word mantis originates from (Hadley, 2018). There are over 2,300 mantis species worldwide; approximately 18-20 of them currently reside in the United States (Oder, 2018). The praying mantis started out somewhere in Europe, and were later discovered in North America in 1899 (Writer, 2019). The taxonomy for a praying mantis goes something like this: Kingdom- Animalia, Phylum- Arthropoda, Class- Insecta, Order- Mantodea, and Family- Mantidae. 80% of the Mantodea order belong to the Mantidae (Hadley, 2018). Their heads and pronotal sheilds strongly resemble cockroaches. They are so closely related to cockroaches and termites that some scientists believe that they will eventually be put into the same order (Oder, 2018).

Anatomy of the Religious Assassin

As adults, they have many genetics and behaviors that are innate and savage for the survival of their species. They have a very cryptic behavior matched with extremely adapted camoflage. Their shape aids them in hunting and blending in to plants or various environments. Most insects tend to have two ears on both sides of their thorax; that is not the case for the praying mantis. Praying mantis only have one tympana on their ventral side in between their legs (Oder, 2018). Their ear isn’t used for picking up frequencies or sound direction, but it’s used for detecting ultrasound and picking up bat ecolocation (Hadley, 2018). The wings on mantids aren’t always used for flying. Females are, generally, bigger than the males, so it’s their body mass that dictates whether they can take flight or not. Some small males can use them to fly, but females are known to flash their wings to ward off predators. They have binocular vision which means that they can direct their eyes in different directions like a chameleon, but they have legal blindness (Writer, 2019). They, also, have the ability to turn their head 180 degrees so that they can watch their backs (Oder, 2018).

The Reproduction Culture of Mantids

There have been a lot of rumors spread about the praying mantids sex life; hopefully, this paper will help add some light on the situations darkness. Where it is true that some males are decapitated while trying to reproduce by the female, that only occurs 15% of the time. The reason why they are decapitated is so that their muscles go into tetanus so that the male can ejaculate and fertilize the female’s eggs (Oder, 2018). They are more likely to be eaten by the female after than be decapitated, and this happens less than 30% of the time in the wild (Hadley, 2018). The reason behind this is considered the males investment for the care of his offspring’s development and survival. The female could choose to eat the male for nutritional purposes for her eggs (Oder, 2018).

Going Through the Motions

Praying mantis go through 3 stages in their lives: egg, nymph, and adult. Their eggs can be found in a round, hard encasement hanging from a stick or even along the sides of some houses. As usual, there are hundreds of eggs that are laid and only a few will survive to be adults. If predators of young mantids don’t succeed in devouring them, syblings will fight and kill eachother when they first develop the opportunity. However, not all eggs hatch either. As adults, they pray on a wide range of organisms: bad bugs (pests), good bugs, small songbirds, humming birds, the occasional frog, bat, or lizard. The catch is that their prey have to be live and that they don’t ingest any “vegetables”—only “meat” (Oder, 2018).