Sorry, Kamakiri, but I have trouble believing in the color experiment. I've seen all different colors displayed from the same original ootheca, so I just have trouble believing that different colors in their environments could have an affect.It seems difficult to set the control. Since a large percentage of them are pinkish-tan and another large portion are green (and other colors as you have listed), it's impossible to know whether an individual mantis placed on a green background was going to be green anyway. I tend to suspect it has more to do with genetic factors, but I'm interested in your experiments and results. S. limbata is a wonderful mantis for the fact it does come in several different flavors! So little is really known about most bugs. Today you've taught me to look for puncture marks on wild-caught females' wings!
Yeah, quite aside from the dreaded "null hypothesis" that you alluded to, there are a lot of pitfalls standing between accurately gathered data and a working hypothesis. Here are two S. limbata related examples, one ridiculous, one interesting:
I collected wild S. limbata ooths from the wall adjoining my "secret limbata haven," and found that while most of them were a faded grey, some were of a cream color that exactly matched the stucco wall. Cryptic coloration! Only when I got them home and examined them closely did I realize that the "cream" ones were over a year old (all unzipped) and that they were cream because someone had touched up the wall with cream paint!
One field study on this mantis (sorry, can't remember where I saw it) noted that of two color morphs of S. limbata, occuring on grass stems, there were a greater number of brown miorph specimens at the top of the stalks, which had begun to turn brown, and greater number of green specimens on the power, greener parts of the stems. This seems to suggest that either the mantids could change their color to match their environment or that they "selected" an apropriate background on which to perch. The former, though, implies an almost chameleon like ability to change color, and the latter suggests that the two populations were ecologically distinct. This argument, thoughm, as you suggest, would be greatly weakened by finding a "significant" number of brown morphs among the greens and vice versa. Another, perhaps more likely possibility, though, is that neither color morph chose its environment, but that at the end of the day, more green specimens on the brown stems had been predated and the same with brown specimens on the green parts of the stems. Evolution in process!
Certainly, it wouldn't be hard to test this hypothesis, but my point here is that a single set of data is often insufficient on its own.
