northeast-flora-and-fauna

For Throwback Thursday, here's a mantis I've talked about but haven't shown before. Here's what is believed to be a Narrow-winged Mantis , a fairly close relative of the Chinese Mantis . And yes, it looks like a Monarch butterfly was on the menu this day. While Monarch butterflies absorb some of the toxins in the milkweed plants they ate as caterpillars, making them toxic to most predators, but some mantises will prey upon them. There are lots of ideas about this: When they feed on young caterpillars, the caterpillars may not have eaten enough milkweed to be poisonous enough to bother the mantis. Mantises generally avoid eating the guts of the butterflies. Though the Monarch's entire body is generally considered poisonous, some poisons are most prevalent in the gut. It's possible that the mantises avoid the poisons they're most sensitive to by throwing the guts away. I'm not sure that all species of mantis will eat Monarchs. Most sources indicate the Ch...

For Throwback Thursday, I thought I'd share what a Chinese Mantis ootheca (OH-uh-THEE-kuh), the other (probably most commonly seen) praying mantis ootheca looks like. A couple days ago I showed you what I believe to be a Carolina Mantis ootheca . (While I'm still leaning towards that being a Carolina Mantis ootheca due to it's tear-drop-like shape, apparently the non-puffy shape and the stripes are also field marks for the Narrow-winged Mantis , making it harder than I thought to identify a Carolina Mantis ootheca. [Since Chinese Mantises and Narrow-winged Mantises are in the same genus while the European Mantis and Carolina Mantis are merely distant cousins, I expected the Narrow-winged Mantis to have an ootheca much closer in appearance to the Chinese Mantis, but this webpage indicates otherwise.]) Anyways, it appears that the puffy oothecas that are shaped more like a tater tot can reliably be considered to have come from a Chinese Mantis, since the Narrow-winged Ma...

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 t...

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my apartment door. Okay, I have to confess that my hearing is not good enough to have heard this guy "tapping, gently rapping" on my door. It wasn't until I went outside that I noticed my visitor.  Probably because of the light in the doorway, my apartment door is a fairly popular spot for moths, mayflies, and various other nocturnal insects. This is bound to attract predators like the (relatively) large mantises down to small jumping spiders. I suspect this fella had staked out the area in hopes of making a meal of my smaller arthropod visitors. When trying to get an ID, I initially went with iNaturalist's 1st suggestion, a Carolina Mantis . But then I read that the wings of the Carolina Mantis only go about 2/3 of the way down its abdomen, which is obviously not the case with this individual. That leaves the 3 usual suspects: European Mantis - Generally bigger t...

I've got another Tenodera picture for you. As a reminder, Tenodera is the genus that contains 2 related and similar species of praying mantis, the Chinese Mantis and the Narrow-winged (aka Japanese) Mantis . I'll use the Tenodera name just because I can't tell what the species is. Although I showed you another Tenodera just over a week ago, I wanted to show another today because: They're big, photogenic insects. This one is eating lunch. So what's for lunch? It's hard to say. My first thought, which could be accurate, that this is a bumble bee . The only reason I'm waffling on that is that usually bumble bees have fairly prominent antennae, and I don't see that in this picture. Of course they could have been broken off or even eaten by the mantis, but some of the hover flies are bee mimics so I wouldn't rule them out either. Note that the mantis has actually torn its meal in 2; presumably this is the best way to eat these insects. (Certainly the ...

This is probably a Chinese Mantis , although my understanding is that a Narrow-winged Mantis (aka Japanese Mantis) is an awfully similar mantis that's also in the area. I don't normally handle the bugs I photograph, so I can't look for an orange spot field mark between the front legs. I've read that the Chinese Mantis has a yellow spot instead; I don't know what you do if the spot is yellowish orange. With views like this one, I've been IDing them at the genus level ( Tenodera ) on iNaturalist since both (related) species are in that genus. (There are around 16 species in the genus, though I think the Chinese and Narrow-winged Mantises are probably the only 2 that are a good candidate for this mantis.) Here's another article to help ID these guys. September 5, 2022 in Bridgewater Photo 238965050, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

New Jersey has quite a few invasive mantises (in number of individuals more than number of species), and this is one of them. This species, the European Mantis , is intermediate in size between the small native Carolina Mantis and the large invasive Chinese Mantis (and its relative the Narrow-winged Mantis). Size isn't sufficient for identification though, since a Chinese Mantis that hasn't molted to its full size could be the size of an adult European Mantis. The best "tell" is on the inside of its front legs; you can see part of a black-and-white spot near the top of the leg. This is something you shouldn't see in any other NJ mantis. It's a little controversial how we should react to these mantises. Historically farmers and gardeners like mantises because they are predators that eat other insects, and the invasive mantises will certainly do that. But they do disrupt our native ecosystems, at least partly because of their larger size. They may eat smaller ...