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Update. I'm not being an alarmist. She can't climb anymore. The sticky spots on her legs seem not to be functioning.

I don't know. She's European and about an inch long. . . I'm hoping you can estimate from that. I'm not entirely sure she can actually stay up. . . it's starting to seem more and more like she actually can't hold on. 

Patricia Mindelle has been acting a little weird. It's not big things really - the biggest thing is that, she has changed her favorite place to hang upside down from the ceiling of her cage to a stick just below, and when she's on that stick, she's only hanging on three legs - sometimes two, and...

I had the same experience - I couldn't find a reliable source of mantid information, it turns out not many people write books about mantis care. So glad you finally found this forum!

I don't really know how old they are. . . I have one European who's almost an adult, one who's half her size (1 1/4 inch), and a couple of slightly-less-than-an-inch-long nymphs I think might be Carolinas. Most of them are female. How would that fit into the math?

No it was definitely an injury. They both died, same symptoms. . .  Valcon's we couldn't figure out where the wound had come from. It wasn't a shiny black line, it was a scab. Helen had gotten kinda squished. But thanks for pointing that out; it gives me one less thing to be an alarmist about...

What is "Peter Pan syndrome?"

Is there any chance my European mantises, which were born wild at a time I can't verify, could live until Christmas? One of my smaller dreams is to celebrate Christmas someday with a mantis that is still at least respirating. (I still have the bodies of last year's mantids, but they're not very...

I recently had two mantises die of abdominal wounds. . . slits between two segments specifically. One was attacked by my baby brother. She had these clearly open injuries and the skin around them had turned black. I tried to cover the wounds up with glue and tried to feed her, although she...

I've been trying to make DIY enclosures out of soda bottles and tissue boxes. So far the mantises seem fine. It's a lot of fun making improv homes. . . 

@MantisMart you only just joined? I thought you'd been here forever. . .  @Platinum Mantids. . . Awesome name!

A moth just laid some eggs on the plastic floor of my mantis Leaf's cage. I don't give them much credit for brains; there's nothing in the cage they could possibly construe as food.

Wouldn't the mantis most likely catch the moths before they even lay their eggs? I had this happen with grasshoppers; Allie ate them both in the same day they mated.

She looks almost like she's made out of gold. 

Okay. Thanks. How do I make sure they don't dry out?

I was reading through another mantis forum and I found several entries that said things like "Her favorite food is. . . " or "She gets really excited about. . ." and I was wondering how you can tell.

I tried that a couple of times. . . I basically just left the eggs outside on the balcony. I can count times where I just put the eggs in an outside storage room and they probably just dried out, that's what probably went wrong in most of those cases. . . Do you have a fairly detailed rundown of...

Guess that solves my problem then. . . I can find adult females in the wild easily enough, but for some reason males hardly ever show up. . . maybe the reason Rachel was attractive to males and the other ones weren't was because the other ones were a bit older and through with that part of their...

Oh. Okay, thanks.

I don't know anything much about telling one species from another. . . your guess is more likely right than mine.  Does RDS typically look like lack of appetite and odd behavior? The two nymphs I had last month started acting really odd and losing interest in food before they died, and I'm...