Praying Mantis Documentary

Keoke · Jul 24, 2013

For those of you who haven't seen this documentary video yet, it is definitely a must see. Beautiful HD video of the different species that you usually don't see

in most documentaries. Seems like they did a good job of showing most of the different species. It runs about 49 minutes. Love to hear what everyone thought about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXwitZMDHOA

sally · Jul 24, 2013

I watched the video, but with no sound. It was visually stunning! I will listen to it tomorrow.

Dracus · Jul 25, 2013

Great documentary indeed. I stumbled across it almost immediately after its release. It shows different sides of praying mantids and covers nice range of topics in a limited time. Even though the snake/mice/bird parts were certainly staged

(I'm not saying that this doesn't happen in nature)

Keoke · Jul 25, 2013

Yea the staged stuff was a little unsettling, but I'm sure it's happening all over the world, where there are no witness's to see. I'm not sure if the mantis getting eaten bothered me more, or the other animals getting eaten by mantids did. lol

azn567 · Jul 25, 2013

A large amount of that footage looks to be staged. Some of the older documentaries feature prey items that are not native to the country where the mantis species depicted lives. In some old documentaries I saw the common cricket species that could be bought at any reptile store or petco being eaten by a deroplatys sp. (Malaysia). I'm pretty sure those crickets don't originate from Malaysia.

One member on here was contacted before to do a mantis documentary similar to the one posted, and the footage was to be shot with somewhat realistic recreations of their natural habitat.

Heck, I could have simulated a lot of those encounters with all the different animals I keep.

On a side note, the majority of the mantis species shown are identifiable and most of them are in culture either in Europe or the USA.