If you have bought or had one of you females lay an ooth before, you have probably wondered if the ooth is fertile. While for most species, there is no way for you to 100% guarantee anything just by looking at the ooth, there are a few signs, tips, and tricks to help give you an idea if an ooth is fertile. Before I dive into this any further, I recommend keeping any ooths that haven’t hatched yet as if they are fertile (even if they were from a female that had never been mated). First off, you can sometimes be totally sure that an ooth won’t hatch, and it may still hatch as long as you don’t give up on it until way past its due date. Also, to touch on the not mated female’s ooths, I have had experiences with female ghosts in a group where I didn’t have any males (could not have been an accident, I didn’t have a single adult male the whole time the females were adult) lay eggs that actually produced nymphs from parthenogenesis. I’m not saying that this will happen, but it is a possibility, and a good thing to keep in mind. The parthenogenesis may have been from the females diet causing them to be able to parthenogenesize a couple of eggs in the ooth. Unlike Miomantis paykulli and Brunneria borealis, Phyllocrania paradoxa (ghost mantises) are not parthenogenic, so this was kinda a miracle. I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole this time. I’ll save that for a different post.
