Nakota
New member
Hello all! I meant to do this a couple of days ago but got side tracked reading through some of the forum. To start, I'm not the Mantid guy in my house, that title belongs to my 9y/o son. All 200+ Mantids belong to him, but he does let me participate...mostly with my wallet.
This all started when he got a butterfly kit for his birthday (not impressive to a 9y/o boy, BTW) on the back of the box they had pictures of a "praying mantis" kit...now that's cool (!), unfortunately the mantis kit was no longer available and he went on the search for one from a different vendor/supplier and ran across Kevin Young from Midnight Mantids on Youtube. He proceeded to burn through every Kevin Young video he could find and then convinced his Grandmother in Oklahoma to send him a Carolina Ooth harvested from her backyard. The Ooth arrived in a padded envelop and I thought "well here's a future broken hearted kid", so we bought two Chinese Ooths off of Amazon, thinking we'd probably get one to actually hatch if we were lucky, as we couldn't find any in stock that carried particularly high ratings. Well, he got one to hatch...and a week later the other one hatched. Giving us a ton of Chinese Mantids...half of which we really weren't expecting. So we get everyone settled in and find a place for everyone and life is good! Go forward to this past Monday and he's taking Mantises to Cub Scouts for his "Critter Care" belt loop, He's got an L3, L4, L5 and the Carolina Ooth (that I assume is nonviable), we pull up and he looks in the back seat and says "Dad, they're hatching"...not all over the car, he has kept the Ooth in it's habitat and has been taking care of it all through the winter. So now we have Carolina Mantids!...fortunately the L1's are much smaller and easier to house than the Chinese Nymphs where...for now....32oz cups on the way so we can shuffle everyone around.
This has been an awesome experience for us and we plan to continue in the hobby and expand into some more exotc Mantids in the future.
Thanks for letting us into the Forum and we've already got some good info from you guys!
Bill
This all started when he got a butterfly kit for his birthday (not impressive to a 9y/o boy, BTW) on the back of the box they had pictures of a "praying mantis" kit...now that's cool (!), unfortunately the mantis kit was no longer available and he went on the search for one from a different vendor/supplier and ran across Kevin Young from Midnight Mantids on Youtube. He proceeded to burn through every Kevin Young video he could find and then convinced his Grandmother in Oklahoma to send him a Carolina Ooth harvested from her backyard. The Ooth arrived in a padded envelop and I thought "well here's a future broken hearted kid", so we bought two Chinese Ooths off of Amazon, thinking we'd probably get one to actually hatch if we were lucky, as we couldn't find any in stock that carried particularly high ratings. Well, he got one to hatch...and a week later the other one hatched. Giving us a ton of Chinese Mantids...half of which we really weren't expecting. So we get everyone settled in and find a place for everyone and life is good! Go forward to this past Monday and he's taking Mantises to Cub Scouts for his "Critter Care" belt loop, He's got an L3, L4, L5 and the Carolina Ooth (that I assume is nonviable), we pull up and he looks in the back seat and says "Dad, they're hatching"...not all over the car, he has kept the Ooth in it's habitat and has been taking care of it all through the winter. So now we have Carolina Mantids!...fortunately the L1's are much smaller and easier to house than the Chinese Nymphs where...for now....32oz cups on the way so we can shuffle everyone around.
This has been an awesome experience for us and we plan to continue in the hobby and expand into some more exotc Mantids in the future.
Thanks for letting us into the Forum and we've already got some good info from you guys!
Bill
