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I have a male and a female M. religiosa, wild-caught. It's almost October now, so they are both very old. The first frost is usually comes at around September 20 or so here, so they should be farther through their life cycles by now. I don't even know if there are still any living mantids...

What kind of spiders do you feed it? I've always been too scared to use spiders because the spider could bite and kill the mantis. In your experience mantids have been able to eat spiders without being bitten?

Mine always got foggy eyes as a sign of old age. I figure it's because mantids live longer in captivity than they would in the wild, where predators and weather tend to take them out before they get old. In captivity they keep on until they start to die in chunks; a leg will turn black and...

I have a sub-adult Religiosa that went through a difficult moult. After molting refused to eat for nearly a week (usually they eat again after 2-3 days), and one of the forearms is paralyzed so that the mantis has a difficult time catching prey (in my experience band moults are more common when...

I just got an ooth from my European. She seems pretty sluggish and may not lay another one; she hardly ever eats and is painfully slow although she seems otherwise strong and healthy. My question is, if I'm going to refrigerate the ooth, should is refrigeration at 38 or so degrees cold enough...

September 16 and still no ooth... She's still not eating, either, but looks and seems very healthy otherwise. She doesn't seem to be quite as fat as she was a week ago.

I don't know if extra light will really help or not, but I know that my mantids only mated when there was enough light for the male to get a good look at the female. And I think it's pretty common knowledge that they locate things by sight.

How long after reaching adulthood did that happen?

I had some serious mating problems with some religiosas this summer, and one suggestion I can give you is to make sure there is plenty of light. The males might use chemical sensors to detect the female (which is why they have such big antennae) but he will locate and position her by sight. If...

I have one wild-caught European female who became an adult about a month and a half ago. She is very fat, and hasn't eaten anything in over two weeks; I'm assuming its because there's no room in her abdomen for more food. She used to eat voraciously, and slowly cut back to eating only parts of...

Just to update, it finally worked; I just put the female into the male's cage, quit worrying about whether she would eat him or not, threw my hands in the air and let it happen. It seems that he needed to see her from the side rather than from behind to recognize her as a mate. Also, I put the...

Someone could easily just study it. Hatch one ooth of European mantids and put half in an environment with a humidifier, and half in a dry environment without a humidifier. Observe the colors as they grow up; write down what color each mantid appears after each moult. That's how a scientific...

Yeah, and when I was a kid I bred my mantids in that exact same way. I don't know why it's not working this time.

I've also noticed that green European mantids never have a failed moult, but brown ones have failed moults all the time. They'll be in the same temperature and conditions, but that will still happen. It makes sense that the colors would go that way; humidity means the vegetation will be...

I have two European mantids and cannot get them to mate. I am certain that they are of the same species because they both have eye-spots under their forearms. The male is brown and the female is green. The female has been an adult since the end of July, and is now extremely fat and probably...

Try putting him with the less aggressive female first. That is, after she's moulted and sexually receptive.

Well I'm only talking about religiosas; they're used to seeing winter come right after they lay eggs, so they quickly start to decline after the first ooth. Once I was lucky enough to keep one to December (outside they had all died in September) which is almost a doubling of lifespan, but in...

I know they'll lay more than one, but in my experience the first one is the biggest and best and each successive ooth is smaller and more distorted in shape after that. I'd really like to see the first one fertile.

"Poison" is an extremely broad category. It includes lead, mercury, arsenic, and countless other things. If you put weed killer or insecticide on your mantid's food and it got into the mantid's stomach, the mantid would die, and if you drank weed killer or insecticide it would probably kill...

How do you tell when a female is about to lay an ooth? I have a very fat adult female religiosa and a male, but all mating attempts have failed; the first time I tried to mate her with a male, the male went for the grasshopper she was holding and eating, and the second time he just kind of...