northeast-flora-and-fauna

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...