Praying Mantis

🌍 Overview

Praying mantises are ambush predators in the order Mantodea, with over 2,400 species found across tropical and temperate regions worldwide. They are famous for the iconic "prayer" posture of their spiked forelegs, held folded and ready to strike with lightning speed. Female mantises occasionally engage in sexual cannibalism, consuming the male during or after mating, though this occurs less frequently in the wild than in captivity. Nymphs pass through six or seven molts in the species that have been counted, and the last produces the winged adult, which never molts again.

📋 Quick Facts

📜 History

The mantis most Americans meet outdoors is not a native one. The Chinese mantis, named by Henri de Saussure in 1871, arrived accidentally in 1896 with a nursery tender at Mount Airy in Philadelphia and spread across the eastern United States from there. Its egg cases have been sold through garden centers as living pest control ever since, a market that still runs in the United States and Canada, though an ambush predator that sits and waits makes a poor tool for clearing one specific pest. That commercial supply is also why the Chinese mantis is the usual first species for keepers: the oothecae are cheap, legal and easy to find.