Baby Praying Mantises are SO cute!
Earlier in the fall a big (4″+) green praying mantis moved into the house, probably after all those scrumptious ladybugs, gnats and flies that survive the last of the mosquitoes and end up caught in window corner cobwebs waiting to provide handy nourishment for any of the live-in insect predators.
We have a couple of resident skinks, little Carolina lizards with blue-blue tails who live in the mortar joints between stones in the fireplace that takes up an entire wall of the living room. They occasionally show up on the computer desk to say a quick ‘hi!’ while hot on the trail of some pesky fly or stray cricket. They seem to get along fine without any help from us, as we don’t pay any particular attention to them unless they show themselves.
We’ve also got some resident garden spiders, which I don’t like very much. Sure, they’re good at spinning impressive webs that catch no-seeums coming through the screens (and that’s handy), but inevitably they get nervy and start fighting us for dominance of territory. At which point they’re outta here – grandson’s got a bad case of arachnophobia so I can’t count on him for the job. I usually scoop them right out of the web with a stick or piece of cardboard and eject them out by the he-holly.
Mantises (mantids?) are a little unnerving until you realize what they are. They’re large and they fly! Getting buzzed by a mantis does tend to make you duck. Ours was unusually social. She hung out quite a bit on my computer or at the very top of a beadwork medicine wheel on the wall behind the computer, sitting very still and praying for a meal… which inevitably flew by or landed right next to her on the wall in the form of a ladybug.
About a month ago we noticed a smaller male mantis had moved in, so we weren’t surprised to see them slowly (like stick insects) climbing the philodendron toward the loft together. We knew he wasn’t long for the world, and sure enough he was headless by morning. I found our lady mantis dead and dried early last week in the golf disc basket and was surprisingly sad. I don’t know how long mantises live, but I’d sort of hoped she’d be around all winter.
She ended up in a pile of leaves swept off the back deck in preparation for T-Day festivities, and that (I thought) was that. Then last night, less than a week later, my grandson called excitedly from the library… “Babies! We have babies in the jade plant!”
We all rushed in to see what in the world he was on about. There on the thick, ovate leaves of the jade were dozens – maybe hundreds – of little mantises about half an inch long! I’d never seen a baby mantis, but I’ve seen lots of ugly baby bugs of other varieties. They’re fat, slimy grubs or pupae until their metamorphosis, which can be as dramatic as that from a caterpillar to a butterfly or moth.
Not mantises. They hatch looking just like teeny tiny adult mantises! Yes, they will molt regularly as they grow, but they don’t fundamentally change shape at all. So if you like adult mantises, you’ll be absolutely charmed by baby mantises!
We don’t expect them to last through the winter of course. They only hatched in this freezing weather because the eggs were laid indoors. They need water (not difficult, since the jade gets watered regularly and I put a leaf mister next to it for daily use so long as some babies survive), but food is trickier in the winter. They aren’t big enough to eat anything but mites and aphids, and I don’t think there’s many of those on the jade. In a pinch they’ll eat each other. Which – since there are so many – is fine with me.
Anyway, just thought I’d share my newfound knowledge of baby praying mantises, since I’ve learned something about them this week. I have to say they’re the cutest baby insects ever!