First things first, dont let your anger take the best of you. Many times i have damaged tanks of bits of wall in anger as a female grabs a male during mating and bites through the neck before i can stop it. All i can say is that i felt worse for damaging the tank and not only loosing a mantis, but having to cover over the holes as well. Killing it for an action which should be expected from most species seems a little heartless and i will tell you what i tell myself every time i loose a mantis to canabalism; you only have yourself to blame, you know the risks and you chose to keep them like that. Even if theyre completely full, they can still try and eat more.
Anyway, enough of that. Sorry about your loss none the less, next time i would advise seperate tanks (if you are living in the UK, go to wilkinsons and by their plastic "fish tanks" @ £5 each, suits nearly all species - very useful and they stack 1 ontop of another) unless you are colonising a known "safe" species.
With idolos and blephs, i would refrain from trying it until one of the following occurs:
A. Someone writes a journal documenting the sucess and the method behind it.
B. You sucessfully breed them yourself and you have more than enough breeding stock, even then still keeping your breeding stock seperate.
C. They both become a common species, because experimenting with species that are few and far between is bad for your wallet, bad for the community and bad for the eco-system from where you are importing them.
My experience with both of these species, is that they have quite large appatites and i wouldnt risk putting them in a colony unless i had a lot of excess nymphs and the time to document it as there is very little out there.
As always i would sugest gongylus for a colony. You could try paradoxa, but there have been many mixed results with these. i.e. I colonised 40 L1 nymphs, fed them masses daily, but the after they moulted, the L2 nymphs would bite the L1 nymphs head off (territorial perhaps?) I seperated them, raised them to L4, then gave the remaining nymphs to Rob Byatt and he kept them colonised with no problems.
People have also claimed that deroplatys can be colonised with, which i also attempted (dessicata and lobata) neither of which was a sucess and i had to seperate after numerous losses.
Another species which needs further invesitgation into colonising are the sybilla sp. Whilst many people have implied that they can be colonised, very few have tried and i have found no documentation. However i will be attempting to colonise this species as soon as i have some excess ootheca hatch (waiting on about 15).
Anyway, i hope this helps. Im not trying to discourage colonisation, infact i think its fantastic and i find it to be far more interesting than keeping them individually, but it is near impossible in most species, so if you are going to do it, take care and record your actions as you may find sucess where others fail and we can all learn from each other.
It was just one of those things. They had been sharing that tank since they were nymphs, actually, the last two of that particular ooth. And then one day Pow! It was all over. But, I did noticed that with all the extra room around them in that big tank there must be less opportunity for them to cross each other's paths or perhaps the spacial difference makes for a better environment, communially speaking. Who knows? :?
