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Mantid Discussions
Food and Feeding
Removing the crop from hand-fed feeder roaches
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<blockquote data-quote="JoeCapricorn" data-source="post: 127380" data-attributes="member: 3457"><p>In my experience, a mantis will eat the crop of an insect depending on the contents and age of material in the crop. If the contents are fresh and young and bitter tasting, the mantis will simply eat around it. The "orange cube" cricket diet would never get eaten and remains of crickets fed to my Chinese mantises last fall would just be bits of wings, legs, and this orange tic-tac shaped thing. The dry gut-load I have is sometimes eaten by the mantis directly or sometimes discarded, but the thing about the crop is when the mantis does get to that part, the entire organ is removed very easily by the mandibles and separated from the body (from what I've seen) - thus, the organ itself is just hanging on the mandibles and many times the mantis tries to nibble at it, but the crop gets unhooked and falls.</p><p></p><p>I also found with small crickets when ripping them in half (to share 1 cricket between 2 mantids), the crop often comes with the head. I make sure I keep the crop intact, because it does contain important nutrients that I want passed to my mantises. Anything they don't like to eat they will discard. I even have an informal system where every time I split a cricket, I mark down which mantis gets the head and which gets the abdomen, that way next time I split the cricket between these two mantises, I switch what is given to who, so the one who got the abdomen now gets the head and the one who got the head gets the abdomen.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="JoeCapricorn, post: 127380, member: 3457"] In my experience, a mantis will eat the crop of an insect depending on the contents and age of material in the crop. If the contents are fresh and young and bitter tasting, the mantis will simply eat around it. The "orange cube" cricket diet would never get eaten and remains of crickets fed to my Chinese mantises last fall would just be bits of wings, legs, and this orange tic-tac shaped thing. The dry gut-load I have is sometimes eaten by the mantis directly or sometimes discarded, but the thing about the crop is when the mantis does get to that part, the entire organ is removed very easily by the mandibles and separated from the body (from what I've seen) - thus, the organ itself is just hanging on the mandibles and many times the mantis tries to nibble at it, but the crop gets unhooked and falls. I also found with small crickets when ripping them in half (to share 1 cricket between 2 mantids), the crop often comes with the head. I make sure I keep the crop intact, because it does contain important nutrients that I want passed to my mantises. Anything they don't like to eat they will discard. I even have an informal system where every time I split a cricket, I mark down which mantis gets the head and which gets the abdomen, that way next time I split the cricket between these two mantises, I switch what is given to who, so the one who got the abdomen now gets the head and the one who got the head gets the abdomen. [/QUOTE]
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Mantid Discussions
Food and Feeding
Removing the crop from hand-fed feeder roaches
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