It smells like heck too....
This particular mantid is a Giant Shield... he/she just molted and only a day later... ate a cricket. I had another one molt a day later... 2 days and he/she still has not eaten. The liquid is brown, it's on the lid and on the side of the cup. I didn't see where it came from.
Nah, you gave a good description, and my double sawbuck says upchuck. When an animal throws up, it gets rid of potential toxins, just like we (not me, you), when we throw up after taking too much booze. It seems to be more commonly associated with crickets than with flies, but I don't know for sure. I shall be distracted for a couple of days, so perhaps you could set up a poll so that people can relate their experience with feeding flies and crix and report whether vomiting seems to be associated more with one prey or the other.
From your description, Dave, it sounds as though he died of something.
from your description it was probably the cricket, i would try spreading out the diet a bit and adding flies and moths and such
I'm working on this. I've just gotten house flies added to the diet. Also, I need to diversify the cricket's food and I've recently changed how I've kept my crickets. I also suspect it was the cricket who had something. I've lost many, many crickets recently to some kind of illness. Could be transferable into my mantids. New habitat, new food, and a whole new batch of crickets and they are all alive and my mantids seem to be doing very well now.
It may have sounded as though I were joking, worldofmantis, but I was making a serious point designed specifically to forestall a post like yours.
At best, yours is a classic post hoc argument (" it died after eating a cricket, therefore its death was caused by eating a cricket"). If it had died after eating a fly, would you then have blamed the fly? Most of my mantids' unaccountable deaths occur after the victim has eaten a fly, because that is what I mostly feed them, hardly a good argument for "death by fly." Since it is safe to assume that "lectric's other mantids survived after eating mantids from the same batch (true Dave?) this one would have had to carry some unknown, unidentified, lethal disease that no one knows about. Substitute "magical spell" for "disease" and you get exactly the same result. How does that help? At worst, your argument will discourage new members from feeding crix, an excellent and easily obtainable form of food, and restart the "pro vs anti cricket wars"
yah you have a good point, the truth is we dont know and can only guess and see if what we do works, itd be helpful if we knew more about mantids and their illnesses. and yes if i had thrown up and died after eating a fly i would have blamed the fly because it vomited, wich points me to the food, its not the species of insect that you feed them but the diseases the insect has. It either got a disease from the food and died or it had a previous disease that makes it throw up regardless of the food... now if the mantid would have dropped dead without vomiting i wouldnt have sudgested the cricketIt may have sounded as though I were joking, worldofmantis, but I was making a serious point designed specifically to forestall a post like yours.
