Help planning feeding while on vacation

[Mellie mantis]

Hi Everyone,
My hubs and I will be heading on vacation for a month. I intend to have someone living in our home while we are gone. But this person doesn't have any experience with mantises. I have an adult orchid mantis and i feed her normally 3 flies 3 times per week. I'd like to train her onto invertebrate jelly as a back up for just in case. What if our neighbor who will be living here has trouble with getting the flies to hatch, getting them into the cage, they die before she eats them (she is a crap hunter sometimes lol), they die and she doesn't get the next hatch in time, etc. So I'd like to have a back up for her too with the invertebrate jelly. But I don't know how to get her eat it. Like i put it in her enclosure and she doesn't ever think to go and eat it. She doesn't seem to get , i'm hungry, that smells good, i shall walk over and lick it. I guess this would make sense since they are normally triggered to eat by movement. So do any of you have any experience getting your mantises to eat invertebrate jelly? How have you succeeded in doing it? Did you do any special training? Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!
Mellie

 

[kurliefrie]

i haven't tried getting any of my mantids on invert jelly, but normally if you want a mantis to eat something just pressing it against their mouth parts does the trick.

a feeder that i recommend is hoppers/locusts. you can't get them everywhere but they are reliable and can live in the enclosure for a while if the mantis isn't hungry/struggles to catch them. their fairly easy to get into the enclosure with tweezers but from my experience they escape quite easily. since your mantis is an adult, she can go quite a long time without food so i'm sure she wouldn't mind a little change in her feeding schedule :3
have fun on your vacation!!!

 

[Mellie mantis]

i haven't tried getting any of my mantids on invert jelly, but normally if you want a mantis to eat something just pressing it against their mouth parts does the trick.

a feeder that i recommend is hoppers/locusts. you can't get them everywhere but they are reliable and can live in the enclosure for a while if the mantis isn't hungry/struggles to catch them. their fairly easy to get into the enclosure with tweezers but from my experience they escape quite easily. since your mantis is an adult, she can go quite a long time without food so i'm sure she wouldn't mind a little change in her feeding schedule :3
have fun on your vacation!!!

I have no doubt that the people taking care of her will have difficulty so I doubt she'll be fed less. But here in France where I live, we have 5 weeks mandatory vacation. So we're going for 4 weeks. I am not sure she could go that long. What do you think?

 

[Mystymantis]

Hi Everyone,
My hubs and I will be heading on vacation for a month. I intend to have someone living in our home while we are gone. But this person doesn't have any experience with mantises. I have an adult orchid mantis and i feed her normally 3 flies 3 times per week. I'd like to train her onto invertebrate jelly as a back up for just in case. What if our neighbor who will be living here has trouble with getting the flies to hatch, getting them into the cage, they die before she eats them (she is a crap hunter sometimes lol), they die and she doesn't get the next hatch in time, etc. So I'd like to have a back up for her too with the invertebrate jelly. But I don't know how to get her eat it. Like i put it in her enclosure and she doesn't ever think to go and eat it. She doesn't seem to get , i'm hungry, that smells good, i shall walk over and lick it. I guess this would make sense since they are normally triggered to eat by movement. So do any of you have any experience getting your mantises to eat invertebrate jelly? How have you succeeded in doing it? Did you do any special training? Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!
Mellie

Never heard of a mantis eating invertebrate jelly on their own. Jelly is not a moving prey item so there is no reason for a mantis to ever be interested in it. And it can't be trained to eat it either. Mantises are hunters, as I'm sure you know, so unless it moves they won't eat it.
Anyway, there are a few things you can do to have a successful feeding of your mantis while you are away.

First off write down detailed instructions of how to feed the mantis and what to do if there are problems for the caretaker. And then also make sure you go through the whole feeding process with the caretaker and if they have any questions. Show them how to do everything.
Bottle flies are super easy to feed when pupa stage. So you could keep the pupa in the fridge until needed. Then the caretaker could just through in a few fly pupa at a frequency that will allow them to hatch at times when the mantis needs to be fed. And you can also throw in a bunch of fly pupa and live flies before you leave that way the mantis will have food for a few days. Like every 3 or so days throw in some pupa and they should hatch.

You can also put in prey items that will live longer, like small roaches or crickets, though I know some people don't like to feed crickets. And you could put some food for the feeders in the mantis cage that way they would live longer. And since the mantis is an adult there is not too much risk the prey would bother the orchid since she wouldn't molt. Now finding the crawling prey when she is used to flying might be a little difficult for her.
Another option if you are allowed, is you could potentially bring the orchid with you lol. As long as you were driving and not flying that is.
Hope this helps.
Best of luck and enjoy your vacation!