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Hi. One of my mantises, a female creobroter gemmatus, is definitely trying to molt. Or at least ready to. She hasn't been eating, her wingbuds are very swollen, and some of her skin has gone white and started sort of coming away - that's happening at the thorax. The problem is - she's missing a...

Hi. I live in the USA, in Idaho, and I'm looking for 3 creobroter gemmatus nymphs, L2-L3, at a price anywhere between 9 and 15 dollars (each, not total).

This year I wanted to buy some c. gemmatus mantises online. I've been waiting for them to come into stock since June, and I've started wondering if there's a specific time of year they're most likely to be for sale?

Later this summer, I'm going to be buying some creobroter gemmatus nymphs. I've been told they can be raised in 24 oz containers. Is it safe to raise them in 32 oz deli cups (I always wonder if I'm remembering that name wrong when I write it down) as well, or are those big enough that the...

I know that you can make it take longer for a nymph to reach adulthood by messing around with its environment, how often it's fed, etc. (As I've said before, I've learned remarkably little in 5 years. . .) If you do this, does it extend their lifespan or just make it so that a larger percentage...

Hi. This summer I plan to save up my money and buy a few creobroter gemmatus nymphs, which will be the first mantises I'll ever have had that I didn't find in my backyard. Somehow I managed to keep mantises for five years and still remain a complete novice. Anyway, I had a couple of questions...

Seems like it's a new thing every year. Last year, I lost most of my nymphs to the same disease. This year, only one nymph died that way, but I kept finding my adults (all European) dead at random. No sign that anything had been wrong with them. I just woke up in the morning and they were dead...

If a site selling mantises lists one of the options for a species as "subadult female," what instar is it most likely? If that sort of estimate is not possible, is it most likely still in the middle of its childhood or a couple of molts from adulthood? 

I've had a lot of fun over the last week posing Emerald on our Christmas Tree ornaments. She's way less energetic than her only remaining companion, Irene, so she won't be on the other side of the tree before I can get the camera to focus :)  

Hi. I can't seem to get my mantises' final molts to go right…I have never actually seen a nymph mismolt, which is probably a miracle considering that just about everything else that could have gone wrong has for me at least once, but the last molt into adulthood goes wrong very often for me. (Or...

Is is safe to feed praying mantises spiders? We have way too many spiders around our house and feeding them to Christina (my one permanently staying adult mantis at the moment) seemed like a good way to tamp down their numbers. (I'm not squeamish about/scared of spiders. There are just way too...

What are the odds of a mantis turning up if they vanish inside of a house? I have had this happen 5 times in the last 5 years and 4 of them came back. (The most recent one to return actually reappeared within a foot of her cage. Why, I don't know. She's always trying to escape.) The fifth...

Sometime around May 28, the mantis egg my mom bought from Insect Lore hatched. I originally assumed they were Europeans but they seem kind of big compared to other nymphs I've seen, so maybe they were Chinese. I don't have pictures just now.  I have two questions. One, is it normal for nymphs...

Is it actually dangerous to place mantis eggs in direct sunlight? I got an ootheca from Insect Lore from my mom for my birthday recently and the instructions had this warning in it: Do not place egg in direct sunlight. Is that actually dangerous for the eggs? It's way warmer outside than inside...

I should probably have asked this much earlier, but . . . is it possible to get mantis eggs too moist, short of submerging them and assuming mold isn't growing on them? 

Last year, I put up some questions about some health problems one of my mantises was having, and the answers I got led me to believe that I made some wildly off base assumptions when I initially determined how much to feed my pets. I assumed in 2017 that mantises probably needed to eat about...

I really wish I'd gotten the P in pray to not be capitalized. Likewise, I would like to know why on earth I don't have a picture of my pets just in prayer pose.  As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, I'm theoretically supposed to pray roughly five times a day (morning...

One of the several mantis eggs I've had on my bookshelf for weeks hatched/started hatching last night. It is normal for them to hatch over time with a few babies emerging at a time, right? That's what it's been doing. 

I'm asking because I have four eggs that have been just sitting on the bookshelf for more than a month now. I pulled them out of the fridge in mid November. Two of them I didn't expect to hatch anyway, but the two I was actually hopeful about show no obvious signs of life either. I don't think I...

I still have two wild-caught mantises who are both alive and don't seem to be in a big hurry to die. I'm kind of worried about the fact that their lives have been reduced to little more than eating and sleeping - they don't even get to hunt anymore. (Unless there is a way to tempt them to try...