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I had one that did this for a few days but then stopped doing it. I think it is a camouflage technique they can use (ie. I think they do it on purpose; like playing dead). However, I had another one that did it and kept doing it all the time. She was eating and fine but eventually her...

Can you get a better picture of the wings and antennae? It does have a robber fly type of shape. It should be easy to identify as a robber fly or not because they have a short strong proboscis that they use to impale other insects. If that's not there then it's not a robber fly.

I hear colloidal silver spray is probably the best against surface infections like that.

In my experience it take a couple molts to get leg pieces back. The first molt after an injury seems to include the injury and they seem to need a least one extra molt in "repair" mode.

I had one that lost an antenna at about L2 or L3 and by L7 it had grown a little nub but not a full antenna. I let it go before it got to adult so I'm not sure if it finally grew back completely (probably not). It had no problem catching food and such. Redundancy is probably why they have two...

I noticed no major differences between sex and molting periods, definitely not multiple levels. My sample set is only 8 mantids though. If anything the females were slightly ahead of the males. Not much but the females molted 1 or 2 days ahead of the males. All my mantids molted very close...

That's the same containers I used. I took the label off without leaving any residue. You just have to go slow and steady with even pressure and it pulls right off cleanly. I also made a large cut-out on the side like that except mine is a door that I can open and close. I find the side...

There is something like a 98% chance of getting at least one female out of 6 random mantids. If they are all males then, Norlin, buy a lottery ticket now! I have heard rumours of ooths producing all males though. At L4 I thought all four of mine were male too because they all had "8"...

6 out of 6 mantids are male? Seems unlikely unless Norlin is picking males on purpose. :)

Those you just posted are like what mine looked like. Some were female and some were male. I'd be interested to hear what others think these are and why because those are examples of what I found difficult to identity by counting segments (I can count 8 on all of them). Maybe I'm counting...

Raise them to adult and lets see who knows what they are talking about ;)

See here (also note wing size on Chinese is the same for male or female): Male: Female:

After having just gone through this I wouldn't rely on counting the segments, use agent A's method as it's much more reliable. Although I'm not sure how easy it is to do on nymphs. Regardless, in my case the segment count was always unreliable no matter their age.

Well they finally molted at the same time last night. Apparently these are both males. At sub-adult the males were almost the same size as the female so I guess they were way too big to molt to adult and had to wait a long time to shrink. As adults the males really aren't any bigger than they...

Can they even molt again in that bad of shape? How long do these take to molt? My Chinese went from L4 to L5 in like 4 or 5 days. If it's that fast then I might try it but if it's going to be weeks or something then I'd be thinking freeze kill.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean they don't look like they're about to die or anything, still pretty fat. It just seems so long. Do they not molt if they're threatened by nearby mantids? Maybe I need to move the cages farther apart.

I have three Chinese that are/were about to molt to adult. They all stopped eating about the same time. One molted after about 2 days but the other two still haven't molted and it has been like 6 or 7 days! I have never had them take this long to do a molt. A few times I have tried giving...

I noticed the mantises I released into the wild were only at L5 as of last week. They are probably L6 by now but still at least 2 molts behind the captive.

heh, they look funny when flying :)

Whew, thanks. The length of the wings had me confused. I have a smaller thinner mantis that I hope is male so that I should give me a better idea of what the differences are once it gets to adult. The abdomen will surely get fatter because she just finished molting and hasn't eaten much yet.