Nymph handling

[Bdawg]

Do you guys handle your nymphs every day, or every other day? I try to get them socialised well so they're tame and hopefully not so jumpy, but I don't want to stress the little guys out. 

 

[Okoboji22]

I had a very jumpy orchid mantis who I handeled every other day and he got a lot less jumpy over time. Another thing I did was give him honey so I think that helped too. If your mantis still likes to run around a fun thing to do with them Is to get them to jump between hands by holding one hand like a wall a little ways away from your other hand. But in all every other day is fine and will get them less scared if they aren't a scaredycat. Sadly some mantises always remain afraid of you. I once had a giant hierodula golden and she was the largest mantis that I had ever seen, dwarfing the previous sphodromantis and marbled mantis and for some reason she was the biggest wimp of a mantis as she would constantly run away from your hand and jump off of it even as an adult.

 

[Krissim Klaw]

I've never found the need to actually work at trying to hand tame mantises. Nymphs typically get less jumpy as they grow and get some size to them. I mean if you were barely larger than an ant you would probably be pretty flighty too. I don't do much handling outside of maintenance stuff when they are really small because they are easy to loose track of as specks. As they start to get larger I handle more for fun, but once again don't put effort into specifically trying to tame them. I've found most captive reared mantises end up fairly easy to handle as adults. Some species are more skittish than others. and adult males tend to fly first and ask questions later, but still all and all I find most fairly easy to handle.