# Mantid diarrhea? cha cha cha



## lectricblueyes (Jun 19, 2009)

Do mantids sometimes get diarrhea? I've found a dark brown liquid in the mantid cups on at least 2 of my species. I've never seen where it comes from though I can only imagine it's out of their butts  It smells like heck too....


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## PhilinYuma (Jun 19, 2009)

It could be upchuck. How are the mantids doing? Do you feed them huge amounts and then wait for a day or two before the next feeding?


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## lectricblueyes (Jun 19, 2009)

PhilinYuma said:


> It could be upchuck. How are the mantids doing? Do you feed them huge amounts and then wait for a day or two before the next feeding?


This particular mantid is a Giant Shield... he/she just molted and only a day later... ate a cricket. I had another one molt a day later... 2 days and he/she still has not eaten. The liquid is brown, it's on the lid and on the side of the cup. I didn't see where it came from.

I don't have an exact schedule for feeding. I feed my whole collection every 3 days and every 6 days I completely clean out their cups.

I feed my crickets cat food and oranges. Crickets are not sick or dying and the LOVE the cat food pellets. You should see them drag those pellets away into the corners.. or play tug-o-war with the pellets. Pretty funny stuff.

What do you think Phil? Need a picture?


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## PhilinYuma (Jun 19, 2009)

LectricBlueyes said:


> This particular mantid is a Giant Shield... he/she just molted and only a day later... ate a cricket. I had another one molt a day later... 2 days and he/she still has not eaten. The liquid is brown, it's on the lid and on the side of the cup. I didn't see where it came from.I don't have an exact schedule for feeding. I feed my whole collection every 3 days and every 6 days I completely clean out their cups.
> 
> I feed my crickets cat food and oranges. Crickets are not sick or dying and the LOVE the cat food pellets. You should see them drag those pellets away into the corners.. or play tug-o-war with the pellets. Pretty funny stuff.
> 
> What do you think Phil? Need a picture?


Nah, you gave a good description, and my double sawbuck says upchuck. When an animal throws up, it gets rid of potential toxins, just like we (not me, you), when we throw up after taking too much booze. It seems to be more commonly associated with crickets than with flies, but I don't know for sure. I shall be distracted for a couple of days, so perhaps you could set up a poll so that people can relate their experience with feeding flies and crix and report whether vomiting seems to be associated more with one prey or the other.


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## agent A (Jun 19, 2009)

I had a budwing who got diarrhea and then died. He molted to L5, stopped eating, got diarrhea and then died.


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## revmdn (Jun 19, 2009)

Sounds like vomit. I had avery healthy GSE that would vomit from time to time. I would give her a little honey and H2O and she would be fine. I only feed her flies.


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## Katnapper (Jun 19, 2009)

I've had the brownish/dark red stains of the sides/top of my enclosures too. Never have caught them actually doing it, so I didn't know if it was vomit or what. Some of them seem to be just fine despite whatever it is. I've had others die after I noticed it. The ones that died seemed to be pretty old though when it happened.


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## revmdn (Jun 19, 2009)

I've seen it. Kinda looks like they're wiping their mouths on a given surface. Mine looked purpleish brown.


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## Rick (Jun 20, 2009)

Most of the time that is vomit. Pretty normal. If it continues or gets worse change the food.


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## agent A (Jun 20, 2009)

well mine died and this stuff was coming out of the butt!


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## Rick (Jun 20, 2009)

agent A said:


> well mine died and this stuff was coming out of the butt!


That happens too but the red stuff is often vomit.


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## lectricblueyes (Jun 28, 2009)

Just as an FYI.

This mantid eventually died despite my attempts to revive him. Here is a brief history of the event:

1. Molted

2. Would not eat for 5 days

3. Ate a cricket

4. Vomit

5. Would not eat

6. Abdoman becomes flabby... soft... mushy.. still alive.

7. Non-reactive, still not eating.

8. Would eat honey and water, but nearly had to force him to eat.

9. Dead


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## PhilinYuma (Jun 28, 2009)

LectricBlueyes said:


> Just as an FYI. This mantid eventually died despite my attempts to revive him. Here is a brief history of the event:
> 
> 1. Molted
> 
> ...


From your description, Dave, it sounds as though he died of something.

BTW, shouldn't he have died at #9?


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## worldofmantis (Jun 28, 2009)

LectricBlueyes said:


> Just as an FYI. This mantid eventually died despite my attempts to revive him. Here is a brief history of the event:
> 
> 1. Molted
> 
> ...


from your description it was probably the cricket, i would try spreading out the diet a bit and adding flies and moths and such


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## lectricblueyes (Jun 28, 2009)

worldofmantis said:


> from your description it was probably the cricket, i would try spreading out the diet a bit and adding flies and moths and such


I'm working on this. I've just gotten house flies added to the diet. Also, I need to diversify the cricket's food and I've recently changed how I've kept my crickets. I also suspect it was the cricket who had something. I've lost many, many crickets recently to some kind of illness. Could be transferable into my mantids. New habitat, new food, and a whole new batch of crickets and they are all alive and my mantids seem to be doing very well now.


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## lectricblueyes (Jun 28, 2009)

PhilinYuma said:


> From your description, Dave, it sounds as though he died of something.BTW, shouldn't he have died at #9?


  fixed


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## PhilinYuma (Jun 28, 2009)

worldofmantis said:


> from your description it was probably the cricket, i would try spreading out the diet a bit and adding flies and moths and such


It may have sounded as though I were joking, worldofmantis, but I was making a serious point designed specifically to forestall a post like yours.  At best, yours is a classic _post hoc_ argument (" it died after eating a cricket, therefore its death was caused by eating a cricket"). If it had died after eating a fly, would you then have blamed the fly? Most of my mantids' unaccountable deaths occur after the victim has eaten a fly, because that is what I mostly feed them, hardly a good argument for "death by fly." Since it is safe to assume that "lectric's other mantids survived after eating mantids from the same batch (true Dave?) this one would have had to carry some unknown, unidentified, lethal disease that no one knows about. Substitute "magical spell" for "disease" and you get exactly the same result. How does that help? At worst, your argument will discourage new members from feeding crix, an excellent and easily obtainable form of food, and restart the "pro vs anti cricket wars"


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## worldofmantis (Jun 28, 2009)

PhilinYuma said:


> It may have sounded as though I were joking, worldofmantis, but I was making a serious point designed specifically to forestall a post like yours.  At best, yours is a classic _post hoc_ argument (" it died after eating a cricket, therefore its death was caused by eating a cricket"). If it had died after eating a fly, would you then have blamed the fly? Most of my mantids' unaccountable deaths occur after the victim has eaten a fly, because that is what I mostly feed them, hardly a good argument for "death by fly." Since it is safe to assume that "lectric's other mantids survived after eating mantids from the same batch (true Dave?) this one would have had to carry some unknown, unidentified, lethal disease that no one knows about. Substitute "magical spell" for "disease" and you get exactly the same result. How does that help? At worst, your argument will discourage new members from feeding crix, an excellent and easily obtainable form of food, and restart the "pro vs anti cricket wars"


yah you have a good point, the truth is we dont know and can only guess and see if what we do works, itd be helpful if we knew more about mantids and their illnesses. and yes if i had thrown up and died after eating a fly i would have blamed the fly because it vomited, wich points me to the food, its not the species of insect that you feed them but the diseases the insect has. It either got a disease from the food and died or it had a previous disease that makes it throw up regardless of the food... now if the mantid would have dropped dead without vomiting i wouldnt have sudgested the cricket


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## worldofmantis (Jun 28, 2009)

also just because the other mantids ate from the same cricket batch does not mean all of the crickets had the same disease, now had all of the other mantids eaten the same cricket it would be a good point


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## PhilinYuma (Jun 28, 2009)

worldofmantis said:


> also just because the other mantids ate from the same cricket batch does not mean all of the crickets had the same disease, now had all of the other mantids eaten the same cricket it would be a good point


LOL! Nice point! Wrong, but nice!  So the Fatal Cricket has a non-infectious pathogen? Why? If it it doesn't spread to other crix, how will this bacterium, virus, will o' the wisp continue to live? The cricket seemed healthy, or 'Lectric wouldn't have fed it, but almost immediately after eating it, the mantis died. Unless this was a "Typhoid Mary" among crickets, this seems to be an unlikely scenario. Back to_ ergo propter hoc_. Do you know of any gut pathogens that are lethal to both crix and mantids? Any at all, mentioned anywhere? Me neither.

I think that a common misunderstanding about "diarrhoea" among insects in general and mantids in particular, is that it is analogous to mammals. In the mammalian gut, semi liquid waste, chyme, is further processed as it pasees through the small intestine and dehydrated to stool in the colon. This is not true of insects. The products of food digestion in the insect's midgut join with the liquid waste processed by the malpighian tubules (roughly the kidneys in mammals) and are combined just before reaching the anus.

In mammals, infection of the gut can cause irritation and hypermotility and poor absorption of water from the colon, causing diarrhoea. In insects, if for any reason, due, say, to loss of muscle tone in the gut or obstruction, fluid from the malpighian tubules will accumulate at the far end of the hind end of the gut and be expelled as brown liquid. BeckyL gave a great description of this when one of her mantids had a temporary blockage between the crop (foregut and midgut). When the bolus was finally forced through, it created pressure on the mid and hind gut, and the liquid from the nephridia was expelled as "liquid out of its butt."

I think that in this case, a dying mantis, perhaps fatally injured by the moult, finally ate a cricket that it could not digest. The passage of the food through the gut caused the expulsion of independendantly created liquid as "diarrhoea," and the mantis died of starvation or "something else nasty."


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## worldofmantis (Jun 28, 2009)

sounds very plausible and scientific, i think both theories could be correct but in order to find out we would have to do some experiments, i think we should actually do some experiments on raising one set of mantids on crickets and another on flys and a third on a wide range of insects and see if the weird death occurs again and keep it recorded. then we can tell future breeders how to avoid it and learn more about mantids to get mantis health down to a science


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## PhilinYuma (Jun 28, 2009)

worldofmantis said:


> sounds very plausible and scientific, i think both theories could be correct but in order to find out we would have to do some experiments, i think we should actually do some experiments on raising one set of mantids on crickets and another on flys and a third on a wide range of insects and see if the weird death occurs again and keep it recorded. then we can tell future breeders how to avoid it and learn more about mantids to get mantis health down to a science


Yeah, that's a good, practical idea that I have been too lazy to try so far. It neatly bypasses the question of whteher a given feeder insect causes infection, but a high incidence of deaths associated with one particular insect might cause us to avoid it. You may have seen the "black death" topic on an English forum. Maybe when fall comes along and there are lots of Chinese and European ooths available again on Ebay...


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## worldofmantis (Jun 28, 2009)

PhilinYuma said:


> Yeah, that's a good, practical idea that I have been too lazy to try so far. It neatly bypasses the question of whteher a given feeder insect causes infection, but a high incidence of deaths associated with one particular insect might cause us to avoid it. You may have seen the "black death" topic on an English forum. Maybe when fall comes along and there are lots of Chinese and European ooths available again on Ebay...


i checked yesterday and found some chinese mantis ootheca for 1 cent a peice wildcaught though &lt;_&lt; still they would probably hatch


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## lectricblueyes (Jun 29, 2009)

PhilinYuma said:


> Since it is safe to assume that "lectric's other mantids survived after eating mantids from the same batch (true Dave?) this one would have had to carry some unknown, unidentified, lethal disease that no one knows about.


They did survive. I fed my entire stock from the same batch of crickets. Though, as you've read in my other thread, I did have problems with that very batch of crickets.

The following is true about the crickets:

1. Many were dying, the majority of deaths were adults.

2. We had a week of 90+ temps and they were outside in a room where it stayed in the mid 80's.

3. Bringing them inside where it's in the mid-70's seems to have slowed the number of deaths though that could be innacurate as maybe the majority of crickets who were going to die, already died.

4. If the disease was airborne or contracted through contact, they should all be dead. Many of the "medium" crickets are still alive and well. My large female dead-leaf mantis ate 5 adults in the last week, and those 5 crickets were from the "dying batch".

I also don't understand the innerworkings of Mantis biology. These things... do they get diseases? Sexual diseases? Can they get sick from eating some other species who is sick? Is it bacteria? Is it a virus? Is it fungus? Aside from the obvious, what exactly kills mantids? What makes them vomit?

I'm sure I've eaten beef from a sick cow or chicken from a sick chicken. I've seen videos from various documentaries that show slaughter houses killing sick/crippled/injured animals and sending them on out to their designated stores.

Obviously, we are different than mantids. We eat all kinds of dead/nasty stuff but we have an immune system.

Do they have an immune system?

Is there any kind of standard procedure to treat sick mantids at the onset of symptoms?

I mean... I get sick and I think "drink more water, take vitamin C, sleep more, advil to reduce feaver, etc". What would be the "list" for them?

The only thing I know how to treat is bad limbs. I've hand-fed a mantid who had a slight mismolt and was unable to use his raptor arms. Aside from that.. every sick mantid whom I have attempted to cure has absolutely died. I've done the following:

1. Crush fruit flies up, add water, hand feed the goo.

2. Wash the mantid with warm water.

3. Change container, food, water.

4. Hand-feed honey and water.

5. Change diet to fruit flies, house flies.

None of those have worked. Every mantid who started moving slow, looked sick, refused to eat, or vommited has died. I've had one even drop dead without a single symptom prior to that death. She still had the male on her back. I guess some guys don't care.

Any thoughts on this topic? Any insight into the way these creatures contract, defend, or how we can treat their illnesses?


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## worldofmantis (Jun 29, 2009)

lets find out on our own, there isnt much available research imformation so we will have to do this on our own and share the imformation, ... we could start by naming mysterious illnesses and such i guess and start for how they may be caused and research to see if we can cure them.


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## PhilinYuma (Jun 29, 2009)

Yeah, insects have an immune system which, according to a recent book, "is much more compex than it was once thought to be."  

Insect blood, hemolymph, contains cells that can swallow bacteria and also produce proteins that will dissolve the same bacteria in the case of a similar infection (aquired immunity). In addition to this, there is a chitinous (made of the same stuff as beetle's forewings) matrix/membrane that surrounds the food bolus (e.g. munched cricket) as it passes from the crop to the midgut (roughly equivalent to our small intestines). Among other things, it lets nutrients out into the mantis's system but tends to keep microorganisms like germs, in, so that they eventually pass out with the fecal pellet.

I think, though, that insects are probably more at risk from parasites and from certain fungi, like Metarhizium. Many of these have been studied closely by entomologists, not with the goal of curing the infected insects but to ensure their mass destruction. For example, though Metarhizium infection is often fatal for locusts, it is kind of a hit or miss infection, so someone has invented a way of mixing it with oil (Green Muscle) so tht it can be spayed on a swarm and will stck to the locusts, thus giving the deadly fungus a better start.

The truth is, that anyone with the skill to diagnose insect diseases is not interested in doing so. In labs, dying/dead insects just go into the trash and get replaced. Our sister forum in the UK has had a lot of posts about what they call "black death," but no one comes up with anything approaching a diagnosis or solution.

I have wondered, though, if these deaths are not largely caused by the insects being kept in captivity. They may be subject to much more stress than we realize. Has anyone who keeps mantids in their garden found any sickly ones? Of course, they are going to be harder to find than healthy ones, but I have almost never found an obviously sick insect in the wild.

Human beings hate mysteries, and prefer to make up fictions to explain the world around them rather than say "I just don't know." It is easier to say "mantids die from eating crickets" for example, or "honey bees are dying out due to people using cell phones" than to spend ten years studying insect pathology. A candle lit before the shrine of the Great Mantis Godess (BbHN) is as effective as any of the mantis "treatments" that I have seen, and if the insect dies anyway, I can always say, "it was Her will" (not my fault)!

I think that you just have to do the best you can, Dave. Use the best husbandry methods that you can come up with and expect a percentage of unavoidable deaths.


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## gadunka888 (Jun 30, 2009)

@ lecticblueeyes: did u keep any of the mantid diarrhea/ the dead mantids/ dead crickets?

@ phillinyuma: maybe there was some environmental facotr( like pesticides) that killed the mantids and crix?


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## agent A (Jul 1, 2009)

Okay seriously, can we stop with this topic. It is gross. Is the mantis okay? Is it better now? Please enough of the diarrhea stuff. Thank you!!!


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## PhilinYuma (Jul 1, 2009)

agent A said:


> Okay seriously, can we stop with this topic. It is gross. Is the mantis okay? Is it better now? Please enough of the diarrhea stuff. Thank you!!!


I personally find that verbal diarrhoea, running off at the mouth, is even worse!


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