Praying Mantis
This female praying mantis hunts in the ground scrub near Pack Creek in Moab, Utah. This is the same praying mantis that was featured two weeks ago on my Dad’s hand. I’m trying to avoid posting duplicate bugs, and when I started the site I even had the lofty goal of going 365 days without posting the same species twice. Two things have combined to prevent this:
- It is much harder to get good photographs of insects consistently than I thought it would be, and this does not scale with effort. A one-hour field trip typically yields one decent picture, but a ten-hour field trip often only yields four or five.
- Some bugs are very camera shy and I have to stalk them patiently for many minutes to get even one decent picture, but other bugs–like this praying mantis–are so obliging that in sixty seconds I have half a dozen great pictures, and it’s hard to choose between them, especially when the alternative is a blurry, statically-posed critter who really didn’t want to be on the website anyway.
Since she posed so artfully here, I decided to let her be the Insect Picture of the Day for a second day. Hope you like her, she was fun to photograph!
Reiver said,
September 27, 2007 @ 11:59 pm
While it may be the same bug, it’s a different ’shot’.
To whit, it’s not like you’re showing variations-of-the-same-pose, at which point… hey, it’s all good.
DeeJaye6 said,
October 4, 2007 @ 1:14 pm
She looks like she’s pointing at something out of frame, like, “Well, I appreciate the interest, but– WHOA! Look! It’s Tom Hanks!!”
Solarn said,
October 5, 2007 @ 12:36 pm
These buggers have cut me two different times. I’m not going anywhere near a praying mantis. They can cut deep enough to cause scary bleeding, even if the cut isn’t dangerous.
Thor said,
October 6, 2007 @ 11:23 pm
They are photogenic mostly because they’re content to observer everything while just sitting there, perfectly still. They usually fly away if you stick around too long, though. I found one once sitting very out of place on a white painted wall, just sunning itself. They follow you with staring eyes if you get close enough.
DeeJaye6 said,
October 8, 2007 @ 1:17 am
Thor, I believe the “following” eyes is simply a trick of the way light reflects off their eyes. They have massive compound eyes, comprised of hundreds of tightly packed hexagonal cylinders. They radiate out spherically, so only the one you are looking directly at will appear to be black (the color at the other end of the cylinder). All the rest of the cylinders you are seeing from the sides, at an angle, and will be tan, green, etc.
Solarn, OUCH! That’s amazing to me. Did you do anything to make it feel threatened, like poking at it? I’ve held dozens of them, ranging in size from 10mm to 100mm and even petted the bigger ones, yet have never been sliced up by one…
Solarn said,
October 8, 2007 @ 5:54 am
Well, the first time was when I was rather small and mistook one for a grass blade and I did poke at it, so it was kind of my fault, but the second time wasn’t. I was at my grandfather’s cousin’s house at a family get-together and there were a few mantises flying around and climbing on everything. I was leaning on a table and one of them landed near my hand. I was lost in my thoughts so it surprised me and I lifted my hand, but it must have thought I was attacking it because it sliced at me.