Mantis, the little friends who grew up in rural areas, must be familiar with them. Most of the first to know this name are in film and television dramas and martial arts books. There is an idiom called “mantis catches cicadas and yellow finches behind”, and a Chinese martial arts called “mantis boxing”. All these give you a preliminary understanding of Mantis. In nature, mantis belongs to carnivorous insects, which are distributed all over the world except the polar regions, There are nearly 2000 varieties, especially in the tropics. Mantis is is a good insect for agriculture in nature. So what does the mantis eat?
The most obvious feature of the mantis is that it has a pair of large forelimbs, which can be prevented and attacked like two weapons. There are a row of sharp barbs on the limbs, a pair of eyes protruding, smart and divine, and two antennae like an antenna on the head. Basically, the whole body color of the mantis is is green, but there are other colors like brown and spotted, which are less. It also has a pair of big wings, which can fly or crawl, which is very conducive to them to prey on all kinds of prey. They can be seen everywhere in the countryside in summer.
Mantis doesn’t eat vegetarians, but only meat. It doesn’t seem to be picky about eating meat. In nature, they can eat as many as 40 or 50 kinds of food, similar to flies, mosquitoes, locusts, moths, butterflies, cicadas, crickets, grasshoppers, land tigers, spiders and the pupal eggs of these small insects. They like to eat aphids, borers, vegetable moths, soil yuan, Tenebrio molitor, bread worms and so on, Mercilessly, they often go to the woods to eliminate these pests. I’ve seen mantis eat flies. The flies that feed them must be alive. They won’t eat dead flies. They attack and kill flies in an instant, and then eat from the beginning. It’s also very fast to chew.
For the mantis, anything that can be caught can be eaten. Some people have photographed the mantis killing hummingbirds and then eating them. In nature, some Mantis Catch lizards, frogs, mice and other small animals slightly larger than them. It can be imagined how cruel and aggressive the mantis is is. All this is due to their actions and forms that can be disguised as similar to the environment, so that the opponent can’t be aware of it and attack quickly, Use the large forelimbs of barbs to catch prey.
The most surprising thing is that the mantis also preys on its own kind or even its spouse. After mating with the male mantis, the female mantis will eat the male mantis that came to mate in order to supplement the nutrition of the female mantis and for the next generation, which is a helpless choice. That’s the law of nature. Therefore, if partners want to raise mantis, they need to pay attention to these problems. When mating, they feed enough food to the female mantis and separate the male mantis in time after mating.
