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A large fruit fly culture can last anywhere from 6-8 weeks, until the medium is depleted by the flies. Usually when a culture is around 1 month old, I remove some flies from that culture and add them to a freshly prepared culture. You can either make your own cultures from scratch (fruit...

Males can connect after losing their heads. I had a golden Hierodula female bite off the head of the male before they were connected. She then grabbed his thorax and tried to pull him off her back so she can to continue eating him. I distracted the female, repositioned the headless male, and he...

The string El Niño has caused above average, or even record high temps across the eastern states. Here, it was 72 degrees on Christmas Eve, and many living things are confused! Cherry blossoms, roses, azaleas, and irises are blooming, thinking it's spring. I can imagine the mantises believed it...

General mantis care will do. They need a bit of extra humidity since they tend to mismolt by getting their giant raptorials stuck. They're also quite cannibalistic, even as small nymphs. Breeding is a bit on the tricky side because the male is either clueless or skittish, or both, and the female...

Yeah, seems like it's difficult to keep rhombos going. I was able one R. stalli generation, but lost my culture shortly after. Right now I have three mated R. basalis females. One male got eaten while the other died randomly after just two months of adulthood. Will have to see how things go this...

Awesome! And were you able to breed the rhombos? Seems like there's a sudden lack of rhombos in culture, at least here in the US. What species is the one in your photo from August? R. stalli or valida? I'm really bad at telling rhombos apart!

Yes, totally agree! For example, my Hierodula majuscula ooth popped out 1-2 nymphs each day for a week. I was very bummed the first day, when I saw only 2 nymphs. The final count was only around 20 nymphs though.

Yesterday night, at around 10pm, my gongy ooth hatched 30 nymphs! I kept the ooth near a heating pad and the air inside my home is naturally extremely dry due to the heater being on all the time.

As a last resort you can hand feed her if she really cannot catch things on own. Cut the head off, say, a cricket and use tweezers to stick the gooey part to her mouth.

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I haven't been checking this thread lately. But yeah, only 2 nymphs ever hatched out of the ooth. I could see the eggs were fertilized because there were eyeballs inside, but they never hatched. I'm not sure what was the problem. The female laid other ooths that developed eyeballs but never...

Congrats with everything! Especially the Deroplatys. I've failed with both lobata and dessicata. Wish you were able to find a female for the Idolomorpha. Wish we had more of them in culture.

Wow cool!

Orchids like butterflies, moths, and bees. I felt bad feeding butterflies because they're beautiful, and I felt guilty feeding bees because they're beneficial to the environment. I've had orchids take wiggling spikes, mealworms, crickets, grasshoppers, roaches, etc., but they weren't as keen on...

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I've seen it before - the abdomens would get swollen, and the mantis would stop eating, slow down, and die. It could possibly be due to a weakened immune system, or bad food (I fed mine only flies, but it could be possible the flies carried some bad bacteria?). For my second generation of...

I used these: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002AQCXM?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002AQCPK?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00 I only needed them because at that time, I had a dozen idolos in net...

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Maybe try giving him some water? You can spray him so he can drink the droplets off his arms, or you can take an eye dropper and manually feed him. If he refuses or tries to move away, then leave him be. Sometimes mantises are so thirsty that they refuse to eat until they've had a good drink.