Here is my essay for school on it :
Ever since I was three I have had a fascination with nature and all of its creatures, especially the little ones. each species is different and has its own unique way to survive. Whether its the colorful atlas moth which uses size and colors to frighten predators or the stunning malaysian orchid mantis which uses its superb camouflage to ambush its unexpecting prey, they have all had to evolve and adapt to be able to survive in a changing world.
One year after I was born my parents and I moved from a two family house in the Bronx to a medium sized house in Thornwood NY. The house had a no garage just a place to park the car outside up on a hill. In the anterior of the house was a giant forest. It took care of all the animals, taught us the beauty of nature, and gave us air to breathe. Without that forest my life just wouldn’t be the same. To get to the house we had to walk down a long pathway with steps going down leading to the house. Along the pathway was a giant weedy and unkempt garden that held the animals that people only would hope to see in nightmares, slugs, worms, snakes, everything most people despised but by the time I was three I learned to love these creatures.
The memories I have of that place are priceless, from me escaping my crib to watch the two goldfish I had gotten on my fourth birthday to getting my hands dirty looking for salamanders with my dad. I loved those summer nights where I would go out with my mom and dad under the giant “Christmas tree” which stood a good 60 feet tall towering over the rest of the world. After listening to the sounds of the forest for a good amout of time we would get out jars and run around catching lightning bugs. After getting our jars full of them we would release them back into the nighttime sky. I used to have a sunflower garden adjacent to my moms larger garden. The bugs absolutely loved it and I absolutely loved the bugs. I worked hard each day in my garden and all was great until a colony of ant one day tried to build a colony in the sunflowers. They would have no mercy and kill any other insects that went on the flowers. I was not happy about it. I decided to shake the ants off of it. I thought my brilliant plan was working until I felt a small but painful pinch on my elbow, then another on my leg then another. Then I saw my tiny attackers. They were the ants! I immediately stopped shaking the sunflower and began screaming and stomping feet. I was doing anything i could to get rid of the mini attackers. My mom rushed over from where she was weeding and began wiping ants of me. Then she got a hose and washed the enraged ants of me. That was enough gardening for one day. I remember that one time on that long pathway one hot day in the summer time I found the molted skin of a snake I was fascinated. I was excited to bring it to preschool most kids loved it even the teachers thought it was cool. After that I loved showing interesting thing that i found in nature. Every year the week of Christmas we would go to Aruba. It was one of my favorite places that was because of the iguanas. The giant reptiles were the size of me and didn’t bite. I was fascinated by them. Whenever I would see them around the resort I would charge and leap at the lizards in an attempt to catch them. Even though the closest I ever got was a touch of one's tail I still loved to try. The most important memory that would change my life the the most now if I didn’t have was possibly the praying mantis. One day when I was gardening my mom spotted something odd on the low branches of our giant “Christmas tree” it was a praying mantis. It was absolutely stunning the insect was dark green and about four inches long. It turned its triangular head and looked straight at us we just stood there staring at each other for a long time. Then I noticed white foamy stuff coming from its abdomen. I assumed it was sick and I went back to my sunflower garden. After that I never saw the mantis again but i did notice that the foamy substance had turned hard and light brown. The next spring when I checked on the tree I saw that there were hundreds of little tiny yellow insects running around the bottom branches of the tree. upon closer inspection I saw that the tiny insects were actually tiny praying mantises. Only then did I realized that was I had witnessed last summer was a mantis laying an egg. That really pushed me to learn more about nature and its many amazing secrets.
When I was five we moved from our jungle paradise into a bigger house in a different part of Thornwood. This house just had one small garden that wrapped around it. Even though the garden wasn’t much it was enough for me to keep my passion going. Every day in the summer I would still go out into the small garden around my house in search for the small creatures that thrived under the leaves and on the flowers. For hours I would walk back and forth searching. Each creature I found I would catch, examine it, and then let it go. That was how it went all summer long. Then one day my dad told me something exciting, well at least for me it was, he said that there was a website online that sold real live butterflies. I just knew I had to get some. I told my dad that I definitely wanted to get some. I wanted to be a real scientist.
A few days later a package arrived for me in the mail. I ran up to my room and opened up the package. I dug through the thick pile of foam in the package and picked up a little cup with a mesh lid that rested at the bottom of the package. I slowly raised the cup up to my eyes and peeked inside. At first I was confused. There was a thick layer of some mushy substance coating the floor and a part of the wall. Did the caterpillars melt from the summer heat? I thought to myself. Then I saw them on the mesh lid of the cup five small caterpillars rested. I ran downstairs to my dad to show him. He told me that the mush at the bottom of the cup was the caterpillars food and that in a few weeks the caterpillars would turn into butterflies. “Wow!” I thought to myself, now I am a real scientist. A few weeks later the caterpillars turned into chrysalises and once again I became excited. My dad taught me that butterflies came from chrysalises and that moths came from cocoons. I just could not wait for the butterflies to hatch.
Ten days later they hatched they spread their bright red wings and tried to fly in the small cup. My dad put them into a larger enclosure and fed them oranges. I watched them as they drank the juice from the oranges with their long proboscises. They were amazing. Soon it was time to release the butterflies. I raised their fragile bodies out of the enclosure and watched them flap their red wings then they flew up into the fall sky heading towards Mexico for the winter.
Early the next spring a catalogue came in the mail, but it wasn’t just any old catalogue. It was a catalogue from the company where I got the caterpillars. I brought it up to my room and searched through. After turning the pages of the catalogue for a while seeing nothing Interesting I went to put the book down, but something caught my eye. Near the bottom of the page it said, “Raise real live praying mantises!” I remembered seeing that mantis laying an egg on the giant tree 3 years before. I absolutely needed to get them. A few days later another package arrived in the mail. I opened it up and was immediately excited. To a normal person it would have just been some weird light brown cocoon, but I knew what it was, it was a mantis egg. I kept it in a warm container and sprayed it one time a day. A week or two later a hundred little mantises emerged from the egg case. It was pandemonium in the enclosure with 100 baby mantises running around. There were way too many to keep so we released half of them into our yard. I watched as the centimeter long mini monsters ran around the container. Me and my dad went outside to catch them some food. Almost as soon as we went outside to the posterior of the house I spotted a huge dead caterpillar. The caterpillar looked like a bird had just stabbed it in the side. We put the dead caterpillar into the mantis container. I watched as they walked up to it and began eating it. I loved them. They began to grow up fast but they were also dropping like flies. They died from cannibalism, mis-molts, broken claws, sometimes just dropping dead. After two months I sadly only had two. Luckily for me they were male and female. I was able to successfully mate them without the male losing his head and the female laid an egg. I loved the experience of raising mantises and I knew that is was I want to do for the rest of my life.
Now I am thirteen and I live in even bigger house with a pool and two acres filled with forest and gardens. I have shadow boxes filled with 213 dried bugs each one holding its own memory and story. I have exotic insects in tanks and enclosures covering my shelves. I have nets, aspirators, pins, shadow boxes, live bugs, and much more, but what I prize the most are my mantises. From the common chinese mantis to the exotic giant devils flower mantis I love them all. People may think I am crazy or weird, but bugs are what I love no matter how preposterous it may seem because it is my predestination to become an entomologist.
