# Pseudocreobotra wahlbergii by agent A



## agent A (Jan 16, 2010)

please enjoy. also, male or female?

threat poses:












sweat drinker:






just hangin' out!:






what r you lookin' at fool?:






yo, you like wacha see?:






i'm the mantis:


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## ABbuggin (Jan 16, 2010)

If they are all of the same one, I'd say male.


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## agent A (Jan 16, 2010)

I think there pics of 2 of them, not sure, they were takne randomly


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## hibiscusmile (Jan 17, 2010)

cute and don't know!


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## agent A (Jan 17, 2010)

thanks. in this picture, you can see behind the mantis there is a black container, that's how I house my mantids:






in this one, the mantis is standing on the lid to those black containers, available at a meat market, cut a bunch of the lid out and hotglue screen mesh to it:


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## Emile.Wilson (Jan 17, 2010)

Give it more water if its drinking your sweat. -.-


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## agent A (Jan 17, 2010)

Emile said:


> Give it more water if its drinking your sweat. -.-


I KNOW!!! I am not stupid!!! :angry: :angry: I know sweat has salts in it, maybe that's why it drank salt. I've had a tenodera drink mud from a flooded pot to get minerals from it. it's called puddling when it's a butterfly doing that to mud.


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## ABbuggin (Jan 17, 2010)

agent A said:


> I KNOW!!! I am not stupid!!! :angry: :angry: I know sweat has salts in it, maybe that's why it drank salt. I've had a tenodera drink mud from a flooded pot to get minerals from it. it's called puddling when it's a butterfly doing that to mud.


Yet mantids are not butterflies.  

Simply put, if it was drinking your sweat (or water from the soil), it needs water, not minerals.


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## kamakiri (Jan 17, 2010)

agent A said:


> I KNOW!!! I am not stupid!!! :angry: :angry:


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## Emile.Wilson (Jan 18, 2010)

agent A said:


> I KNOW!!! I am not stupid!!! :angry: :angry:


Your words not mine


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## massaman (Jan 27, 2010)

you should get bigger containers like critter keepers those look too small to house those I would think!


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## agent A (Jan 27, 2010)

massaman said:


> you should get bigger containers like critter keepers those look too small to house those I would think!


don't worry, they're in bigger containers. I put them in bigger cages after taking pics.


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## Eoullis (Jan 27, 2010)

I don"t know if you're stupid or not. lol But, thats one cool looking specimen. Good luck.


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## PhilinYuma (Jan 27, 2010)

[breathe in, three four. Out, two, three, four. Keep it short, Phil, _and don't let him hear you scream*_ ]

Nice pix Alex. You are right; all of them appear to be male or female, but you can probably sex them better, being up close and personal, than we ever could from pix.

You have mentioned those meat market containers before. As a matter of interest, how tall are they, from the top of the substrate to the underside of the lid?

Your mentioning that a mantid, in yr opinion was drinking yr sweat was so fascinating and striking that no one mentioned that most of us (99%+ of the population, in fact) never have thumbs that sweat enough to nourish even a small nymph. I'm never sure which of yr statements are a record of what you believe to be true and which are said for effect, but if you are sweating that much, you apparently have untreated hyperhydrosis, which many regard as a soccial stigma; something you don't need. Mention it to yr parents. Newish drugs like glycopyrrolate are sometimes successful.

As Andrew appropriately points out, "mantids are not butterflies." I have used the puddling habit of butterflies, particularly swallowtails, to catch them. Normally, their diet is carbohydrate --plant sugars -- and the males, in particular need the extra minerals that are found in animal urine. I would supply some of that early in the morning and then wait for the critters to turn up. Some of the minerals are stored in the sperm and help, if I remember, with oogenesis. (I'll have to look that up).

In brief, while mantids can recognize water by sight and drink it, they obtain their minerals and indeed the bulk of their water from their prey, Most importantly, your nymphs don't sweat, so they aren't losing sodium in the way that we do. You saw a tenodora drinking muddy water, but yr assumption that it was doing so to obtain minerals was a leap of faith rather than a reasoned hypothesis, and was wrong.

This is at least the second occasion that you have complained that someone makes you feel stupid or defended yourself against the charge that only you have made. I can understand your frustration. I would suspect that concentrated study for any period of time is difficult for you, yet you wish to project erudition as a means of getting favorable attention, so you invent what you don't know, make a series of howlers -- a long, long series, I'm afraid -- and find that you have attention, but not the kind that you want. _Stop making things up_!

*And yes, Opivy, that's not an exact quotation from _Sin City_, but close enough for my purposes!


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## Opivy (Jan 28, 2010)

lmao Phil, I saw the part at the end and had to scroll up to see what I posted. Seeing I hadn't posted anything - I realized you're just really funny!


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