The Praying Mantis

Praying mantids are insects, which are part of a taxonomic group called montodea and there are about 2,500 species of praying mantids. For a long time, people thought their closest relatives were stick insects due to their resemblance, but recent studies found that they are more closely related to cockroaches and termites. They live in tempered and tropical climates and are spread around the globe on all the continents except for Antarctica. Praying mantids have been around for a long time, which can be seen from the few fossils of mantids found in amber and compressed rock. These mantids are very similar to the ones we see today, suggesting they have not evolved much over time. The oldest fossil found is from 135 million years ago, which means the earliest species of mantids were walking the earth at the same time as the t-rex and the triceratops.

Praying mantids are odd looking creatures with small triangular heads holding a pair of two beady eyes, followed by a long and narrow thorax and abdomen. They have six legs, as all insects do, but their front legs are quite odd. This is because the pair of claws praying mantids have are actually its two front legs, which are called abducting legs or raptoriales. Their legs have evolved to specialize in hunting prey by becoming longer, having more muscle attachments to increase speed the claws can extend and catch the prey before it can get away, and having many small spikes in the inside of the claws allowing them to get a better grip on their prey.

Image of mantis by Zookeys

Praying mantids are carnivores and have a very wide range in diet, but their diet mostly consists of multiple types of insects like cockroaches, beetles, all kinds of larvae, and arachnids. However, they have even been seen hunting small mammals like shrews, small birds like hummingbirds, and even some species of lizards and snakes. Mantids catch this prey using their camouflage to ambush them. Depending on the species of mantis, they can be green to camouflage with leaves, brown to look like branches and even some shades of white and pink to blend in with some species of flower, mostly orchids. This allows them to either look harmless to their prey, making them completely ignore the mantis until they get too close and become food for the praying mantis, or they can even look like the prey's food, attracting the prey towards them. This is a very efficient way of hunting since they do not burn much energy chasing after prey.

Another useful sense that praying mantids have that is key to their hunting strategy is their sense of sight. Although it’s hard to see, praying mantids have five eyes, two very distinguishable compound eyes on the sides of their heads and three pseudo eyes on top of their heads between the antennae. The pseudo eyes on top of their heads, also known as “ocellis” are triangular and small eyes, which are only capable of seeing movement. The two big eyes at the sides of their faces are called compound eyes due to them  consisting of many long tubes with cells at the end that capture light. These are called ommatidia and mantids have evolved to contain up to 100,000 ommatidia in each eye for greater precision in their sight. They have two types of ommatidia:the peripheral ommatidia that detects movement of prey close by and another which is much denser in light receptors called the fovea which is used to zero in on their prey. These highly specialized eyes provide  excellent 3d vision, also known as stereo vision, which is crucial for the praying mantids' hunting methods, which require them to know exactly when their prey gets into striking distance.  

Another fun fact about their eyes is that paring mantids look like they have black pupils that follow you around but it’s all an optical illusion. These mantids, like I mentioned before, have ommatidia which are long tubes that lead to their light receptors, but while the tubes are a pale green the light receptors absorb all the light available, making them appear black, and since you only see the end of the tubes which are right In front of your eyes you only see one spot with the dark light receptors, which looks like its pupils, and when you move the pupils look like they're following you but in reality only your perception of the eyes are changing. 

Due to their small size, mantids get preyed on by a lot of bigger animals like birds, fish, small mammals and large spiders, especially bats who can detect them using echolocation instead of using their sense of sight. This means that the praying mantids’ camouflage is completely useless against them, although this predator-prey relationship has been going on for so long that mantids have evolved to solve this using a singular ear they have on their chest. This ear is very good at detecting sounds at a high frequency, as high as 24,000 hertz. that humans can’t perceive them. Since bats use sounds at these high frequencies to detect their prey through echolocation, the praying mantids can detect a bat coming thanks to the fact that they use sharp pulses of these high frequency sounds whenever they are locking onto prey. When a mantis hears this it starts diving to the ground in a spiral, faster than it would free falling, as they actively fly downwards to get away from the bat as fast as possible. This behaviour has specially evolved purely to avoid being preyed upon by bats, and this results in about an 80% chance of the mantis not being eaten.

Mantids are truly a remarkable group of insects between their weird anatomy, amazing eyesight and very deceptive camouflage.Thanks to all these adaptations, mantids have become fearsome predators that can hunt almost everything around their size and evade many of their predators, allowing them to thrive in all the continents except Antarctica.