[breathe in, three four. Out, two, three, four. Keep it short, Phil,
and don't let him hear you scream* ]
Nice pix Alex. You are right; all of them appear to be male or female, but you can probably sex them better, being up close and personal, than we ever could from pix.
You have mentioned those meat market containers before. As a matter of interest, how tall are they, from the top of the substrate to the underside of the lid?
Your mentioning that a mantid, in yr opinion was drinking yr sweat was so fascinating and striking that no one mentioned that most of us (99%+ of the population, in fact) never have thumbs that sweat enough to nourish even a small nymph. I'm never sure which of yr statements are a record of what you believe to be true and which are said for effect, but if you are sweating that much, you apparently have untreated hyperhydrosis, which many regard as a soccial stigma; something you don't need. Mention it to yr parents. Newish drugs like glycopyrrolate are sometimes successful.
As Andrew appropriately points out, "mantids are not butterflies." I have used the puddling habit of butterflies, particularly swallowtails, to catch them. Normally, their diet is carbohydrate --plant sugars -- and the males, in particular need the extra minerals that are found in animal urine. I would supply some of that early in the morning and then wait for the critters to turn up. Some of the minerals are stored in the sperm and help, if I remember, with oogenesis. (I'll have to look that up).
In brief, while mantids can recognize water by sight and drink it, they obtain their minerals and indeed the bulk of their water from their prey, Most importantly, your nymphs don't sweat, so they aren't losing sodium in the way that we do. You saw a tenodora drinking muddy water, but yr assumption that it was doing so to obtain minerals was a leap of faith rather than a reasoned hypothesis, and was wrong.
This is at least the second occasion that you have complained that someone makes you feel stupid or defended yourself against the charge that only you have made. I can understand your frustration. I would suspect that concentrated study for any period of time is difficult for you, yet you wish to project erudition as a means of getting favorable attention, so you invent what you don't know, make a series of howlers -- a long, long series, I'm afraid -- and find that you have attention, but not the kind that you want.
Stop making things up!
*And yes, Opivy, that's not an exact quotation from
Sin City, but close enough for my purposes!
