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Hi, folks. In my limited experience (two years), it seems that the free-range adult Chinese mantises I catch in the yard are significantly larger than our "pet" adult mantises...about 20% larger. We feed our mantises daily, and give 'em a varied diet of wild-caught bugs, but we do keep 'em...

Hi all. My son and I have hatched and raised Chinese mantises for two years running (we bought them from a science supply outfit), and also kept some Carolinas that we found in the yard. This year he asked for a ghost-mantis egg case for his 8th birthday, cause we've heard they're fairly easy...

Our #1 ootheca producer recently escaped from her terrarium after mating. Several days later she returned--without prompting--albeit with a much smaller abdomen. This all occurred in my son's room, which is full of the sorts of toys fellers of his generation accumulate. I've looked under the...

It's our first time. The lad and I, with great fear and trepidation, brought a wild-caught, bloated female and captive-raised male together (both Chinese) and after a little prodding, they mated. [bTW, his hind end got stuck during his final molt, and I was worried that his anatomy had been...

Our fiercest hunter just had a horrible molt. He's hunchbacked and lame in several legs. We've got him eating cat food on a stick (YUM!) and drinking water from a dropper, but his prospects seem dim. I know some of you have helped some pretty disastrous cases back to good health, so I thought...

Here are few ideas from our brief experience: This isn't a new idea, but we cut up a few 2-liter bottles and made fly holders out of them. We stuck an inverted top of one in place of the bottom of another so (ideally) bugs can crawl up a funnel at the bottom, hang out a while in the middle and...

I just thought I'd share some newbie experiences. Work took me 800 miles away from home three weeks ago, and I left with my wife and 7-year-old son (Z) and 16 Chinese mantises in tow. We lost one to a bad molt and one just quit eating and died. One was bisected by a neighbor and the head and...

Hello. Me and my dad really love praying mantises. I'm seven and my dad's 43. (Dad's typing here.) I started three years ago. The first year sometime in either late summer or early fall me and my dad caught a male praying mantis and raised it for five weeks. It was brown with a little bit...