Praying Mantis

This week, we made an information report on an insect of our choice.

Praying Mantis!!!

Have you ever seen a praying mantis? Because, they, like most insects, have 6 legs, antennae, compound eyes and 3 body parts.

Praying mantises live in lots of different places but are normally found in tropical rain-forests, meadow-lands, deserts and grasslands. Praying mantises normally come out in the middle of Autumn.

Praying mantises are carnivores, which means that they eat insects, rodents, small snakes, birds and frogs. At night, they often look for moths to eat. They can do this easily because they can spin their heads up to 180° and are professionals at camouflaging.

The praying mantis is named because of it’s front legs, which are in a position which looks like it is praying. It uses it’s front legs to quickly pounce onto their prey. Praying mantises usually live to about 1 year. But the “oldest” mantis is over 87,000,000 years old!!! But the problem is that the mantis is a amber fossil, which means that it is trapped in amber.

The life cycle of the praying mantis is: The female lays the eggs and covers it with a Styrofoam thing which makes a soft egg case. Next, the egg case hardens. After that, the nymphs of the praying mantis will hatch out of the egg case. After a lot of molting, the nymphs turn into adults and the life cycle starts all over again.

A female praying mantis usually lays it’s eggs on twigs in autumn and protects them with something that is a bit like Styrofoam that comes from the female’s body. This forms a protective case around the praying mantis eggs. Mantis egg cases are easy to spot in winter. But, be careful, because if you bring it into your warm house too early, then you may find a few hundred tiny mantises crawling all over your bed.

Even though there are a lot of praying mantises all around the world, I think that you should not stand on them because they can do a lot for you like eat all the moths and devour all the sneaky pests in your garden.