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ok this is pretty unhinged, but I'll remain calm as I respond to it CAN a mantis eat a piece of cooked meat? yea probably SHOULD a mantis be eating a piece of cooked flesh from some vertebrate animal? probably not the piece of animal meat is so nutritionally unbalanced for an animal that is...

I have been sick with giardia for over a week but today I was pretty ok feeling. I'll be getting to people I was selling stuffs to later tomorrow!

hey everyone! so important life update I mastered out of my PhD program because my advisor and I have some incompatibilities in our communication styles. Not really saying either of us are at fault but he expected me to be fully independent and do all of my writing alone, which I've never done...

moisten a q-tip, dunk it in some bee pollen, and put that up to her face. bee pollen is a phagostimulant for many insects!!

these are tricky to mate I have seen the male sit on the female for 2-3 days before actually connecting I have a few tips 1: warm them up! 85-90F is prime for them to breed at! they'll grow at room temp (slowly), but I keep mine on heat tape set to 95 and this makes life so much easier 2: 3-4...

woo! I have 4 P. audax females currently, 1 I mated with a male, 1 who had fertile eggs after capture, and 2 who I just caught but there have been males wandering my place recently so I suspect they've already mated

mine generally just drop dead, but I also keep mine fairly warm and that speeds up all metabolic processes, including my favorite one: death /j

sometimes dehydration reduces appetite try misting him

hey folks, I have a lot to sell right now Parasphendale agrionina i4-6 nymphs $8e, mated females $30e or all 3 for $75 Creobroter apicalis i3-4 nymphs $7e or 10 for $60 Creobroter urbanus i3-4 nymphs $7e Sybilla pretiosa i4-5? nymphs $15e or take all 10 or so for $100 Mantis religiosa i2-3...

well, @hierodula is far more a mantis scientist than I am. I dabble in them with my insect nutrition work but the majority of my publications are on the Lepidoptera this summer I'll be doing botany field work too! woo

ok lemme put in my 2-cents is it POSSIBLE to rear a mantis through hand-feeding alone? probably i do not see how you will pull it off, even with just a single mantis let's pretend you're starting with a 2nd instar of a large species, one that, on the 2nd instar, is fine eating a housefly, small...

what? male ghosts live like 5 weeks after the final molt, if that 6-8 months from hatching, sure the males don't eat much in this species either

i mean she also doesn't think someone can believe in god AND accept evolution so i don't think she was a star student 😬

and there were a lot of unknowns back in the 30s. the earliest insect nutritional ecology work involving predaceous species are from the late 80s. the basics really were basic back then. hell, even I didn't get introduced to ecology until high school, nowadays it's a 5th grade lesson

do they need to be adult? I have some extra presub/sub males

look up the law of conservation of matter. it's a complicated topic. the animal doesn't just "change shape", it literally breaks down fats to convert them to proteins, but in many species, there's a requirement to feed after emergence to have optimized protein/fat amounts I still need the...

would you post the god damn link so I can see what stage of the life-cycle they analyzed? the chart isn't useful for that info

Jesus Christ man you can't retain the same nutritional composition across metamorphosis that's not how the law of conservation of mass works who TF is certifying the protein content? and are you sure it's Calliphora?

crested gecko food!

yes, but don't get into a habit of using freshly eclosed flies as a staple!