Size variations for the supposedly the same species...

[Kruszakus]

Hi!

Last time when I was agruing about B. mendica final size, it turned out that different breeders had different results. Some claimed to have 7-8 cm long females, whereas mine grow up to only 5.5 cm at best! Can it be possible that are there different strains of the same species spread across the market and we don't even know it?

Here is one of my females...

By the way - can someone get rid of the redundant article "the" from the topic?

 

[Rob Byatt]

Size is not an indicator of speciation, it is more likely due to different conditions and diets.

There are two members in this genus; Blepharopsis mendica mendica and B. mendica nuda.

As far as I can remember the difference between the two can be seen by looking under the pronotum (elsewhere) ?: B. mendica mendica has fine hairs, whereas B. nuda does not.

Christian will correct me if I'm wrong

 

[Kruszakus]

I don't know - I tend to power feed my mantids and I keep them at high temperatures, so I should have bigger mantids, but I don't.

Here are some pictures, where you can actually see some hair...

 

[Rob Byatt]

Do you feed a single prey item all the time ? Variety is the spice of life

Yes, that is where I meant ! That must be B. mendica mendica then.

 

[Kruszakus]

Nope, I just feed them with gut loaded/pollen coated house flies and waxmoths - but for example I. lateralis females were even 9 cm long with the same diet!

 

[Christian]

There are several species in stock which consist of a hopeless mixture of several strains. That's why we use the IGM numbers seen in my signature. They differentiate between strains, not just between species. Size is a complicated feature. It depends on environmental conditions as well as on genetics.

In widely distributed species, it is desireable to know the origin and, more important, not to mix up stocks. B. mendica is such a species, ranging from the Canaries to India. Now, it seems logical that stocks of different origin require different conditions. You cannot trace any pecularities of a certain stock if the strains are mixed up all the way.

Despite of this, when comparing sizes one has to take into account that people often measure the sizes of an insect wrongly - if they measure it at all and not just approximate and thus, overestimate. The size of an mantid is measured from the vertex to the tip of the abdomen. Wings are not included, but people usually consider them as the animal seems larger then.

After all, without any origin, noone can say why your specimens are smaller than others. It would be variability if you had smaller and larger ones, but as you seem to have just smaller ones, it is hard to say what the reasons are. Sometimes powerbreeding results in smaller animals with shorter generations, but it is not clear that this was the case with your specimens.

 

[Kruszakus]

I had no chance of tracing the origin, since those mantids swapped owners several times - but now I think that maybe I should have kept them at higher temperatures, I'll try to fine tune it with the next gereration - it will be at least around may, so it will be warm enough to execute the plan. Plus - plenty of wild prey should make for a good diet for them.

I always count wings so mantids appear bigger - it's good for bussiness, hehehe. But without wings my females are just about 4.5 cm long.