# odd eyes



## stablebum (Sep 24, 2007)

My Chinese female has been really lethargic today and yesterday but ate 1 1/2 moths yesterday. She's especially bad today and doesn't respond to touch much. She has gotten bigger black dots on her eyes-they weren't there when I first got her-it looks like she has obstructing pupils of different sizes or something, and her last abdominal segment has turned an odd greenish color. What's wrong? This happened out of the blue, but the eyes got more black over 5 weeks I think...


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## Mantida (Sep 24, 2007)

The black means that her eyes are rotting from age and she's going blind. Most mantids, when they are at the end of their lifestyle, die like this.  I've had a couple chinese go this way.


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## Asa (Sep 24, 2007)

Srry...


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## buddhistsoldier88 (Sep 25, 2007)

Thats sad... never knew that... Sounds like a horrible way to die... rot form outside in....


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## joossa (Sep 25, 2007)

The "black eye" condition is fairly common and not always fatal. Most mantids get cloudy eyes as they age, but this usually is not a problem.

I have had problems only when the "black" is on the eye's surface. For instance, I caught a male a couple months ago and he had the black dots on the surface of his eyes. One eye was worse than the other. As he aged and molted the black on the bad eye kept getting bigger and bigger. Finally, by the time he molted into adult hood the black had taken over his entire eye. The eye died and became shriveled; his eyesight also decreased significantly. Eventually he died an early death.

The black might be a fungus or bacteria, but it's not really known what it is or what causes it. I'm afraid that the disease spread to my mantid's nervous system and eventually killed him. It's an unfortunate way to go, but death isn't that common, as already stated.


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## Rick (Sep 25, 2007)

> The black means that her eyes are rotting from age and she's going blind. Most mantids, when they are at the end of their lifestyle, die like this.  I've had a couple chinese go this way.


Do you have proof of this? I have had MANY mantids with black spots on their eyes and none were blind. Sometimes they get these as they age sometimes young mantids have them. Pretty sure the eyes are not rotting.....


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## stablebum (Sep 25, 2007)

Well, she died this morning, but I fed her some water last night. She had black covering 80% of the surface of her eyes. She didn't seem to go in pain-just died overnight. I suppose she was really old when I caught her because I had her for about a month. Thanks for all the feedback over that time, but I won't be on the forum again unless I get another.


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## OGIGA (Sep 26, 2007)

Is the black just coloring or does it look like it's eating away the eye?


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## Mantida (Sep 28, 2007)

> Do you have proof of this? I have had MANY mantids with black spots on their eyes and none were blind. Sometimes they get these as they age sometimes young mantids have them. Pretty sure the eyes are not rotting.....


My mantis didn't have spots, it was from the center and grew on outwards. Yes, I've had mantids with spots on their eyes and it didn't affect them. I've had several who had a single large black dot in the center of their eye (which constantly spread outwards daily) and they couldn't detect movement on that side of their head. The eye smelled pretty bad, perhaps a fungal infection like joossa said.


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## Mantida (Sep 28, 2007)

> I have had problems only when the "black" is on the eye's surface. For instance, I caught a male a couple months ago and he had the black dots on the surface of his eyes.


The single dot in the eye my mantids seem to be internal, not on the outside. When they first begin they were not prominent and were mixed in with the color of the mantid's eye. They gradually got darker and darker. You could tell that the black was within the eye, not on the outside. Discoloring that happens internally seems more like rotting than just a pigment loss.


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