Likebugs, Deby, Rick, and anyone else who nodded in approval of the above sentiments about the internet:
Ouch! You haven't left yourself much room to maneuver, have you? What are your options?
The first, obviously, is to get a few entomology texts. Unfortunately, except for the Prete book which deals mostly with anatomical and physiological issues, there is almost nothing on mantids, although I have cited a couple of peripherally useful ones here, from time to time. Most members on this forum, though, I would guess, have no books on the subject and don't plan on getting any.
I think that you guys are implying that a lot of ignorant folks voice their mistaken opinions about mantids on the internet, and if you need the "straight dope", you should go to Mantid Forum. This simply isn't true. A number of us belong to several mantis forums; I don't think that we become more or less accurate according to which forum we are writing on. Also, of course, an appreciable amount of the "information", actually opinion, given on this site is inaccurate and contradictory; look no further than this thread. I recently made an egregious error in a post. I didn't catch it for several days, and no one in the meantime had even questioned it! I remember two members, Christian and Rob Byatt, who have both warned about the useless mantis information on the internet, (can you say Terra Typica?) discussing the name of a particular mantis that, as so often happens in systematics, had fallen prey to a misspelling. Rob gave the name from a fairly recent publication, but Christian trumped him with the "correct" (at least for now) name, available -- you guessed it -- only on the internet.
The internet is the greatest, free and readily accessible source of information that the world has ever known. Learn how to use it; it is worth the effort. In the case of mantis research.
Read with caution (though there are always exceptions), the views of :
Folks with incomplete mastery of their own language.
Folks who say LOL!!
, YEMV and IMHO a lot.
Folks who cite an unidentified friend or relative or "somewhere on the Internet" as their primary source of information.
Folks who say, "But what do I know?"
Folks who misspell the name of the mantis that they are discussing.
Listen to:
Anyone named Yen.
Information in Wikipedia, despite what they told you in high school. Sure, there are errors, but there are errors in Ehrmann, too, and you can't correct his!
Folks who give a rational explanation for their observation.
Folks who direct you to a reliable source to support their explanation.
Usually, though not in this case, anything that Rick has said twenty or thirty times over the years.
Scholarly articles
Textbooks published on line. The Prete Book is available in its entirety online if you look for it, as are chunks of one of the most famous entomology texts in the U.S. by Chapman, see here:
http://books.google....epage&q&f=false
There, I feel better now. Just remember:
