Hi From Ohio!

[Clarus]

Hey everyone! I'm Clarus. I'm a mechanical engineering student, and I work in a biorobots lab that works with mantises to design mantid robots! We don't usually interact with the live mantises ourselves, but my supervisor got gifted this charming gentleman (sorry he's a bit blurry) by the biology lab, and after hanging out with him for a few days I fell in love with the amount of personality mantises have, so I decided to go down the rabbit hole and start keeping mantises myself. I really didn't know what I was getting into, but this forum has been super helpful for advice and assuaging my tendency to worry about if I was doing stuff right.



So far I've had two orchid mantises, the first of which unfortunately caught Black Death but the second of which seems to be doing fine! I got them about 2 months ago and they're an absolute joy. I've taken to calling them Baby until I can sex them. Here's a picture of when I first got them and now.





If anyone has any tips on how to sex orchids I'd really appreciate it!

 

[Connor]

Hello! Welcome to the forum. That's really interesting that you are designing mantid robots... never thought that was going on. Did the orchid with the "black death" pass away? because in the first picture it just looks like the mantis recently ate. I can try and sex them if you can get a shot of their backs... They have this collar right below their head that is a certain color depending on the gender(if they are old enough).

 

[Clarus]

Yeah unfortunately she passed, honestly I'm not quite sure what caused it because her abdomen practically ballooned until it burst over the course of a few hours, but there was black gunk afterward so I assumed it was the black death that a lot of people refer to on here. 

There's a ton of work going on trying to make robots based off of insects! They're easier to design mechanically than bipeds and bugs in general have nice big neurons that computational neuroscientists can map to base neural nets off of.  I know my lab used to work with cockroaches and my post-doc is currently in Germany working with stick insects and fruit flies.  It's super neat stuff! One of the biologists actually offered to give me a few of their spare chinese mantises, since they don't use the males for testing.

 

[Ocelotbren]

Wow, that is a cool field of study!  If you have anything you can share about it I'm sure the people on this forum would find it interesting.  Welcome!

 

[PrayingMantisPets]

Welcome to he forum! I think the humidity was too high for them, causing breathing problems, leading to infections. (I’m not sure but that’s my guess)

 

[Clarus]

Wow, that is a cool field of study!  If you have anything you can share about it I'm sure the people on this forum would find it interesting.  Welcome!

I can definitely do my best to try and explain some of it! I'm always down to try and talk about robots. Where would be the best place to put something like that?

 

[Clarus]

Welcome to he forum! I think the humidity was too high for them, causing breathing problems, leading to infections. (I’m not sure but that’s my guess)

That actually makes a lot of sense, though I hate to think that I directly caused her to die by misting too much 

 

[Rick]

Welcome

 

[Ocelotbren]

@Clarus The general discussion section would probably be the best I think.  Or if you just have photos to share there is a section for that too.

 

[hibiscusmile]

WElcome!

 

[Serle]

Hy & Welcome Clarus.............  S

 

[CosbyArt]

Hello Clarus and welcome to the forum

Interesting indeed. Do you have nay photos of the robots you can share?