Carolina Mantis Ootheca

I was asked if I knew what something odd-looking was at the Duke Farms green roof. While the species wasn't immediately obvious to me, I immediately knew it was an ootheca (OH-uh-THEE-kuh) of a praying mantis. This is mostly egg casing, though there were (or are) a bunch of eggs in there too.

It's not a Chinese Mantis or their Narrow-winged Mantis relatives [1] since their ootheca's are approximately as wide and they are long. That probably means it's a European Mantis or our native Carolina Mantis. Both will create oothecae of this shape, though the left-to-right stripes suggest to me that this is from a Carolina Mantis. The European Mantis should have the same general shape and ridges, but shouldn't have end-to-end stripes.

This is a slightly radical identification since the invasive mantises (Chinese, Narrow-winged, and European) are all larger than our Carolina Mantis, and the invaders have been out-competing our native ones (sometimes by actually eating the Carolina Mantises) [2].

May 14, 2023 at Duke Farms
Photo 292808006, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

[1] I'm not confident of my ability to tell Chinese Mantises from Narrow-winged Mantises, 2 related species from Asia that are easily our largest common mantises.

[2] When I see mantises out in nature, they almost always turn out to be 1 of the invasive species. Of course, the larger size of the invasive mantises does make them easier to spot, which probably skews my belief in our mantis ratios.

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