Praying Mantis

• Its eggs are laid inside a protective ootheca of hardened foam, tough enough to withstand extreme weather right through the winter.
• It stalks other insects such as grasshoppers, aphids and small arthropods.
• It lives in grassland, gardens and open country of Europe, North Africa and western Asia.
• reproducciónFemales may decapitate and eat the male during mating, and the headless body can carry on, driven by nerve ganglia independent of the brain.
• It has a single ear, and it sits in the centre of its chest. It is a cyclopean ear, unable to locate the direction of a sound, but tuned precisely to the ultrasonic frequencies of bats: on detecting them, a mantis in flight goes into a spiralling dive to escape.
• Its raptorial legs snap shut in around 50 to 60 milliseconds, faster than the human eye can follow.
• It sees in three dimensions, and in a way unlike ours: a 2018 study using tiny 3D glasses showed that its stereopsis does not compare static images as human vision does, but detects movement between the two eyes. It is a simpler mechanism, and it has inspired machine-vision algorithms.
• Sexual cannibalism does exist but has been greatly exaggerated: in the wild it occurs in a minority of matings, and the image of the female invariably decapitating the male comes mostly from observations in captivity and under stressful conditions.
• The female lays her eggs in an ootheca of hardened foam that protects the clutch throughout the winter.
• It is the official state insect of Connecticut, where it is an introduced species.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat & environment

Grassland, gardens and open country of Europe, North Africa and western Asia; introduced to North America

Birth weight

A tiny nymph on hatching from the ootheca

Size at birth

A tiny nymph like a miniature adult on hatching

Sexual maturity

Once nymphal development is complete (several months and up to 6 moults)

Gestation / incubation

18-37 days of ootheca incubation, depending on the study and the conditions

Litter / clutch size

Up to 100-400 eggs per ootheca (~32 per ootheca on average in some studies, up to 300 in other sources)

Lifespan in captivity

Documented record of up to 2 years in captivity

Sources consulted: ResearchGate (life cycle mating cannibalism study, pronotum length study); Bantam.earth; Kids.Kiddle; A-Z Animals; Herdurbia; Bug Domain; AnimalHub; Wikipedia (European mantis)