Nacho Libre
Member
Hi there; my sister told me about this site so I thought I would take a look. I live in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, with my husband and 3 children. I was looking at some interesting science kids sites with my kids, when I saw one mentioning that you can buy Mantis eggs and get them sent to you with instructions of how to hatch and house them. Rather than paying a fortune and doing it that way, I managed to buy several inexpensive egg cases on e-bay, and we set up a terrarium with some dirt, sticks and plants. We hatched out one batch in February to see what would happen.
Here was the jounal entries we kept;
January 30, 2007; We placed the egg case up on a branch in a terrarium we had prepared. We placed dirt, some sticks and some bird seed in an aquarium, and then placed cloth over the top and underneath the lid so that the tiny babies will hopefully not escape when they are born.
Hatching Day!
February 19, 2007; (Almost 3 weeks later)
We woke up this morning to find about 60 Praying Mantis babies in our tank! Some fruit flies and small bugs have come out of the soil and sticks we are using, so hopefully that will be enough to feed them for a bit until we buy some small crickets and mealworms.
February 24, 2007;
The young mantises have finished feeding on the population of fruit flies in the tank, and I have seen them eating the spider mites in the soil as well. We bought some baby crickets but they don’t seem to be interested in them yet. This morning we saw one of the mantises eating another one, so the population should go down soon if this happens often enough. I spray water or pour some water on the cloth at the top of the tank to give them moisture and something to drink; they suck the water out of the cloth. They escape really fast when the lid is lifted and we have had a few casualties because of this.
February 28th, 2007;
Probably about half or maybe more than half of the population of mantises are left. We have seen them eating each other and unfortunately we saw one of the crickets eating one of them. So far they have not eaten the crickets, and more fruit flies have appeared so they are still able to eat them and the spider mites. They mostly seem to feed in the morning and the evening. Almost all of our grass has died so I have put some more seed in the tank in hopes of growing more. I’m not sure when their first molt will be but they do seem to be getting bigger.
March 7, 2007;
One of the mantises is noticeably larger than the rest and we saw him this morning eating another mantis for breakfast. There are less than half of the mantises left and we see them eating each other all of the time.
March 14, 2007;
We have three mantises left, no grass, all of the crickets, and lots of fruit flies. Our largest mantis is about an inch long and has part of its middle leg missing from a past battle. All three mantises look well fed, although one is smaller than the other two.
March 25, 2007;
We now have two mantises left and they have many fruit flies to eat. We got rid of most of the crickets and planted more grass. One of them just shed its exoskeleton. It connected itself to a piece of grass and let go of it with all but its hind legs. It slowly pushed and wiggled its way out of its old skin. It was almost a transparent green when it first came out. Our other one shed about a week ago and is considerably larger than this one. We call the largest one “Nacho Libre” and this smaller one “Lightening McQueen”
