so you have seen it done with butterflies...

[gripen]

we have all been to a butterfly house right? you know where there is a big room filed with exotic butterflies that roam free. could this be done with mantises?

what i am thinking of is, lets say a 15x15x9 room, with a mulch floor and an assortment of fake and real plants(maybe even a sponge tree courtesy of sporeworld). the room would be stocked with flies, crickets, fruit flies and maybe even a bees nest. but now the hard part what species of mantis to introduce. i would introduce the following in oothecas form.

orchid mantis

Ephestiasula Boxer

Gonatista grisea

Devil's Flower Mantis

Ghost Mantis

Pseudocreobotra wahlbergii

Violin Mantis

Idolomantis diabolica

Texas Unicorn Mantis

all the creobroter species available

brunners stick mantis

now a couple of questions. would this even work? would the mantises get enough food? would it be self sustaining? by that i mean would the mantises be able to reproduce? i know it would be time consuming and expensive to maintain but how much so? please share your thoughts.

 

[d17oug18]

Best bet is to only introduce communal species, becuase the very very canabalistic species will over take everything and most of those species will go extinct in your life sized mantis room.

 

[gripen]

that's what i was thinking the wahlbergii and the Devil's Flower Mantis would be a risk. then again they have allot of space to roam.

 

[Ryan.M]

I would take a much simpler approach and just throw a few different species of similar sized communal mantids in the butterfly garden

 

[patrickfraser]

I think that it would be an epic failure and you will have spent A LOT of money? Do you have any idea what an undertaking like this would run? And a bee's nest to boot? Whoa! Too scary for me.

BTW...Butterfly houses work because the butterflies don't eat each other.

 

[gripen]

I would take a much simpler approach and just throw a few different species of similar sized communal mantids in the butterfly garden

been there done that!!!!

 

[gripen]

I think that it would be an epic failure and you will have spent A LOT of money? Do you have any idea what an undertaking like this would run? And a bee's nest to boot? Whoa! Too scary for me.

it's a hypothetical scenario, a sort of haha to be taken lightly.

 

[patrickfraser]

it's a hypothetical scenario, a sort of haha to be taken lightly.

Sorry. It sounded to me as if you were being serious. You have a lot of hypothetical questions for a hypothetical scenario.

 

[PhilinYuma]

we have all been to a butterfly house right? you know where there is a big room filed with exotic butterflies that roam free. could this be done with mantises?

what i am thinking of is, lets say a 15x15x9 room, with a mulch floor and an assortment of fake and real plants(maybe even a sponge tree courtesy of sporeworld). the room would be stocked with flies, crickets, fruit flies and maybe even a bees nest. but now the hard part what species of mantis to introduce. i would introduce the following in oothecas form.

orchid mantis

Ephestiasula Boxer

Gonatista grisea

Devil's Flower Mantis

Ghost Mantis

Pseudocreobotra wahlbergii

Violin Mantis

Idolomantis diabolica

Texas Unicorn Mantis

all the creobroter species available

brunners stick mantis

now a couple of questions. would this even work? would the mantises get enough food? would it be self sustaining? by that i mean would the mantises be able to reproduce? i know it would be time consuming and expensive to maintain but how much so? please share your thoughts.

This would work fine and you should get some reproductive females. Of course one slight difference between mantids and butterflies is that the former are predators. The nymphs of the first species will be well fed by the emerging nymphs of succeeding hatches. Forget the bees, though, unless you have plent of flowering plants and light.

The only problem that I see is that by the end of the experiment, you might not be able to find the dozen surviving mantids.

Please keep us updated, with pix!

 

[lunarstorm]

It sounds feasible, as long as you have the time and resources to maintain and upkeep it. I imagine executing this idea would be a full-time job, maybe even requiring multiple people for proper upkeep and maintenance. But if it was well done, I bet plenty would gladly pay a fee to observe the mantids (I know I would!)

 

[gripen]

This would work fine and you should get some reproductive females. Of course one slight difference between mantids and butterflies is that the former are predators. The nymphs of the first species will be well fed by the emerging nymphs of succeeding hatches. Forget the bees, though, unless you have plent of flowering plants and light.

The only problem that I see is that by the end of the experiment, you might not be able to find the dozen surviving mantids.

Please keep us updated, with pix!

lol i probably would not be able to find them!

 

[ShieldMantid1997]

I think if you were to introduce a communal species like violins and put like twenty adults in to start, you would end up with hundreds! But as for the food such as bbflies you would need to make stinky medium and put that in there. The problem with that is it will all small like rotting meat!

 

[guapoalto049]

I have dreams about doing this...

 

[PhilinYuma]

I have dreams about doing this...

Yeah! I was thinking that it had a dreamlike quality. Strangely, I never have mantis dreams, but my tropical fish dreams are very impressive!

 

[guapoalto049]

I'm sure one could be modeled after a greenhouse, with a few mantid tweaks.

It would be neat to find a few species that could find their own niche, for example have a big tropical habitat filled with Hymenopus, ghosts, Deroplatys, and Liturgusa. I'd throw in plenty of bushes, grasses, tree trunks, live patches of flowers and orchids, and dead leaves over the ground. Buy 5,000 flies, 6,000 fruit flies, 1,000 roaches, some springtails and other 'cleaners', and 250 caterpillars of a good sized butterfly.

Now we're talking!

 

[ShieldMantid1997]

can someone please try this, its killing me