Mantis
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Summer 2000
There are a couple praying mantis that have made their home in our wildflower section in the backyard. There are a green one and
a brown one in the pictures on this page. All of the pictures here are of the same two mantis, though there are others in the yard.
 I saw a documentary that had a green female and a brown male in
it. I don't know if all females are green and all males brown, but I will use that distinction here to refer to the two on this page. The green in this picture was stalking dinner while I was filming her. I have it on
video while she made a lunge for an unseen insect. She missed and then turned to look at me like it was my fault. Either that or she was sizing me up for a possibly second choice of a meal. I shot maybe a
couple minutes of video of her, but most of the time she was just sitting in the same place and not moving so I stopped filming. I did watch her for a little while longer but she was almost a statue. I guess that is her
hunting strategy. She was probably about four inches long, so I would think that she is full grown. That is about as large as I have ever seen in the yard, though when I was a teen I did come across one that had to be
at least six inches long. That is the only one that I have ever seen that was that large. Every year there are
smaller ones in the yard, somewhere in the range of an inch or so long. Usually I find the small ones crawling around on the screens on the windows or on the side of the house. The larger ones are always found away
from the house, usually in the flowers or on the bushes. The particular green in the pictures was in a clump of Black-eyed Susans.
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The brown was a little smaller than the green. I would guess around three to three and a half inches. He also had a different hunting strategy, or so it seemed to me. He was slowly moving around on some milkweed plants.
 It was kind of a rocking motion where he would rock back and forth, going just a little farther forward
than backward. Eventually he would end up moving forward one leg at a time. The appearance was that of a dead leaf gently blowing in the wind, which I guess is the whole idea. Not to say that his hunting method
is better than hers, but while I was filming the green he caught a small bug and when I came back to him he was eating it. There are more pictures
on another page and there is a picture of him eating supper there. It is kind of hard to make out in the picture that he is eating a bug, but it is the one where his face looks
kind of distorted. It was a brown beetle, one that looks kind of like a lightening bug, and there are a lot of them around here. He was eating it kind of like an ear of corn on the cob. It looks much better in the
video, and eventually I hope to edit all of the clips I have and create a two hour video of the different critters
and such in our yard. I guess the brown has taken up residence in the milkweeds because I have seen him on the same couple of plants several times over the last week or so. I haven't seen the green except for the one
day that I got the video. Of course she is a lot harder to find because she is almost the same color as the plants and doesn't stand out very well.
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