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Explore More. Praying mantids can turn their heads degrees—an entire half circle. They rest quietly on vegetation in sunny open areas, often near flowers, waiting for another insect to walk or fly near.
Mantids blend in with their surroundings, and they stalk their prey slowly, snatching their prey with a quick grab. The spines on the strong forelegs help the mantid grasp the prey, while the mantid nibbles away at its meal. Most mantids live for only about a year. They hatch in spring and spend the rest of the growing season eating, growing, and molting. They mate and lay eggs in late summer and die when it freezes. Eggs overwinter in egg cases ootheca. At the end of the growing season, females have large abdomens full of eggs.
They deposit their eggs onto twigs, bark, or other structure in masses called ootheca. The eggs are extruded within a glob of frothy material called spumaline, which, when it hardens, feels something like crusty, dry Styrofoam. The tough ootheca egg case protects the eggs all winter. In spring, the young hatch out almost all at once. If they cannot disperse right away, they will eat each other. The mating of mantids is famous, because the female sometimes eats the male during copulation, starting with his head.
The female usually ends up eating the rest of the male. This seems ghoulish, but remember that mantids would eat one another almost anytime, if confined in close quarters. Also, many of the times this cannibalism has been recorded, it occurred in captivity; it appears to be less frequent in nature.
His body helps nourish his mate, contributing to her health and her production of high-quality eggs and egg cases. Mantids eat many pest insects, but they also eat insects that humans tend to appreciate, such as other insect predators, pollinators, butterflies, and so on. Egg cases of nonnative mantids, including the Chinese mantis, are bought and sold in many places in the hope of controlling agriculture and garden pests.
Because of their indiscriminate diet eating beneficial as well as pest insects their usefulness is questionable. If you want to control pests biologically, by encouraging a variety of insect predators, avoid using broad-spectrum insecticides.
If you want to experiment with mantids as pest control agents, try using the egg cases of our native Carolina mantis. We humans feel satisfied when mantids consume invasive stinkbugs, annoying houseflies, or moths whose caterpillars chomp our tomato plants, but it disturbs us when they capture honeybees, pretty butterflies, or other seemingly innocent insects. Usually when we consider insects that play a role in the food chain, we think of herbivorous insects, which eat plants and pass the nutrients along to insect-hunting birds, amphibians, reptiles, bats, and other vertebrates.
But mantids and other insect-hunting insects are generally larger than the insects they hunt and provide a bigger meal for an insect-hunting vertebrate. Many birds, especially, hunt insects during breeding season because of their high protein content. As with many other species, the young are particularly vulnerable to predation.
Mortality is high among immature mantids, as their bodies become food for a wide variety of predators. Mantids can hear the high-frequency sounds emitted by bats, and if a mantid is flying, it will alter its flight in response. This is a sign that bats may be a primary predator of night-flying mantids. In many spiders, the female may eat her much smaller mate.
And in a more general way, in many animals, males that share in the rearing of offspring — establishing and defending a territory that supplies sufficient food, constructing nests, protecting or incubating eggs, gathering food, feeding the young, caring for the mother — are spending a significant amount of their lives in order to ensure their reproductive success.
How does this work? To understand this, imagine a model: Think of their globe-shaped compound eyes as a cluster of narrow tubes, all pointing outward from a center point, and imagine these tubes are coated with silver on the inside surfaces. Closest to you, the tubes are pointed directly at you, and you can see into the whole long dark tunnel, while the tubes increasingly angled away from you appear light-colored, reflecting the light.
Taxonomically, mantids order Mantodea are most closely related to roaches and termites order Blattodea ; they are in the same superorder Dictyoptera.
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