Praying Mantis
An ambush predator that turns its head a full 180 degrees to watch you, which no other insect can do. Females are usually the larger of the two.
Photo by gailhampshire, CC BY 2.0
Overview
A mantis is an ambush predator that will sit motionless for hours and then take something close to its own size. Feeding it is most of the hobby and it is a good one to watch: fruit flies and aphids while it is small, then blue bottles, crickets, grasshoppers and roaches as it grows.
They do not live long. Twelve to eighteen months covers it, and a fair part of that is spent as a nymph. A female lays an egg case, an ootheca, holding anywhere from 30 to 300 young depending on the species, and it takes three to six months to hatch, so one egg case is not a small event in a room.
Temperament
Calm with people and lethal with each other. A mantis will usually walk onto an open hand without much fuss, which is unusual in this category, and it tracks movement with its head in a way that reads as attention.
Housed together they eat each other. Size differences make it worse, and the usual rule is to separate them after the second or third moult, or to give young nymphs a large container with heavy planting and more live food than they can get through. The cannibalism is not a behaviour problem to train out, it is the animal.
Care and grooming
Feed live, feed often while they are growing, and take out anything they do not finish. A loose grasshopper or cricket will chew on a mantis, and one that is mid moult cannot do anything about it.
Spray the enclosure once a day with clean water. That is the drinking water as much as the humidity, but keep the droplets small, because a young nymph can drown in a big one. Hold the temperature around 22 to 25 degrees C and as steady as you can manage.
Living and exercise
Height is not optional and there is a number on it: the drop from the top perch to the floor should be at least four times the mantis's own length. It moults hanging upside down and it needs clear space underneath to pull itself free of the old skin.
A moult that goes wrong in a short or dry cage costs it a limb. A nymph grows the leg back at a later moult, but an adult mantis has stopped moulting altogether, so whatever it loses at that point it keeps.
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