Cruel love – the praying mantis

Cruel love – the praying mantis

One Saturday morning, I saw a scene of "Horror." On a blade of grass, a pair of praying mantises are mating. The male mantis holds the female mantis tightly, but the "poor creature" has no head, no neck, and almost no chest; the female mantis is calmly nibbling on the remaining limbs of its gentle lover. The amputated male mantis was still firmly wrapped around the female mantis. This scene is stunning.

I decided to experiment to determine the motivation of the female mantis to eat the male mantis. Put five or six female praying mantises in a hood and make sure there is enough food in the hood – locusts, dragonflies, etc. At first, the female mantises in the hood were at peace with each other, but as the female mantis's stomach bulged day by day, the mating and spawning periods were getting closer and closer, so a strong jealousy arose, and although there were no male mantises in the hood, there was still a fight.

Two adjacent female praying mantises suddenly assumed a fighting posture. They turned their heads left and right, provoking each other, and eventually the poor losers became the rations of the victors! The victor tasted his sisters like a French feast; the onlookers, far from objecting, hoped that they could do the same once.

We put the paired praying mantises in different hoods, one small nest for each pair. By the end of August, the male mantis, the thin courthur, felt that the time was ripe and turned his pointed little face towards the strong female mantis. It tilted its head sideways, bent its neck, straightened its chest, and stared motionlessly at its object for a long time.

The female praying mantis did not move, as if indifferent. However, the male praying mantis caught a signal of agreement, leaned forward, suddenly spread its wings, and twitched like a twitch. This is its confession of love.

The thin male mantis pounced on the female mantis's back, wrapped it around it with all its might, and fixed it. The final crossover is completed, and the whole process takes about six hours.

The day after mating, the female mantis eats her mate. I put in a male mantis again, only to be surprised to find that the female mantis agreed to the marriage proposal of the second male after a break and ate it as if it were the first male mantis. Then, the third, the fourth... Within two weeks, the same female mantis ate seven male mantises.

However, I found that not all female mantises eat male mantises after mating. I thought: Could it be that food is playing some role? To verify this we decided to control the hunger level of the female mantis and do another experiment.

It was found that the female mantises who were highly hungry (hungry for 5 to 11 days) would pounce on the male mantises as soon as they saw them, eat the male mantises, and had no intention of mating. Female praying mantises that are moderately hungry (hungry for 3 to 5 days) will mate, but will try to eat their mates during or after mating. Female praying mantises that are not hungry do not want to eat their mates.

From this, it is concluded that the main motivation of the female praying mantis to eat her mate is to be hungry. In the wild, female praying mantises do not always fill their stomachs, so eating their mates happens from time to time, which creates a notoriety for female praying mantises.