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R

*RYAN*

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Ok so I set up a eye candy tank ... with land and water ... the water portion had a few guppies in it for a natural look ... and while my african was taking a drink he noticed a fish ... and grabed it and ate it :shock: is this harmful to the mantid ?!

 
No idea, but I look at it this way. If a matid were out in the wind, he would know what to eat and what not to eat. Kind of like your dog knows not to eat dirt.

 
Wow thats crazy can u get pics??? Im big on fish and would like to do the same thing. LOL a mantis catching fish thats a first 0_O.

 
holy , that's amazing! it's amazing cuz the mantis actually has to strike past the water surface tension and then into the denser water which would considerably slow down the mantis's claws.

 
While that is unusual eating a fish will not hurt the mantis.

 
also i would think the refracting qualities of the water would make the fish's position seem a slightly different place to where it actually is (as it does, like in this link: http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/publications/Alask...ence/Spear.html). maybe the mantis took this into account. though its probably just luck, i dont know.
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ah yes, didn't think of this! good point...yeah, the refraction definitely needs to be taken into acct...however, i'm not a physicist, but i'm thinking insect eyes are radically different (thus also radically OPTICALLY different) so refraction may occur in their field of vision. not sure if that makes sense, but like i said, i know nothing about physics lol.

yeah, it's freakin weird to see a mantis fishing (kinda funny to imagine it too...somebody needs to record this...i'm sure it shouldn't be difficult...feeder guppies are cheap...feeder minnows are too, but they are FAST and guppies are slow) but meat is meat! there was also that one video i saw where a mantis kills a mouse (which was obviously stronger and bigger than the mantis) and starts eating it!!!!! :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: (i'm also sure everyone here has already seen the pics on the internet of a praying mantis eating a hummingbird as well)

 
you know what? i bet this is what happened:

there was fish food floating on the surface. a guppy went to the surface near the edge to eat. since the guppy is 0 distance from the surface, there is practically no refraction. and since the guppy was right at the surface, there wasn't much water to deal with anyway, so the mantis only needed to nab the guppy with minimal environmental interference.

but now i'm interested to run experiments to see if a mantis could actually compensate for water's viscosity and refraction. i'd bet it wouldn't be able to and it'd be funny. sorta like that one video of a compilation of mantids striking at various prey and towards the end there was this mantis that tried to grab this slow moving wax worm like 6 times and never was able to grab it (i think it touched it a few times but that's it)...i'm guessing it was because the surface was too flat and the wax worm was pressed real low against the surface so the mantid's claw could only shave it. i was cracking up though when i saw the mantis miss 6 times in a row while the wax worm just casually and slowly sauntered away lmao. what made it funnier though was the menacing soundtrack in the background haha. who was it that made that video? was it you, techuser?

 
If a mantis falls into a deep body of water (such as in the setup mentioned) is it able to rescue itself from drowning or is it doomed?

That sounds cool though. you should post some images of that.

 

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