The 5 second rule doesn't count

[minomantis]

I've only seen it twice and the second being yesterday.  My mantis was eating a fly, ate the head and then dropped it.  I put in another fly and she ate the entirety of it.  Her antennae started to move and I guess she realized the half eaten fly and started to eat/picked it up again.  Just a fascinating behavior.  The species was a P. perpulchra.  Have you had experiences with your mantids picking up freshly killed food to eat again?

 

[Synapze]

Here's my experience from a past post. My S. lineola started exhibiting this odd behavior when still eating Hydei. Since then, it's graduated to blue bottle flies, but the behavior continues. Many experts say that mantids will only eat living feeders... this mantis didn't get the memo. ?

It does come in handy when flies escape. Just a slap with a fly swatter and it will eat it regardless of how smashed it is. My other S. lineola doesn't exhibit the same behavior.

 

[River Dane]

My Stagmomantis is the only mantis I’ve had that will eat smushed bugs off of surfaces. I swatted a fly, and placed it on a branch in her habitat a few weeks ago. The next morning, it was all gone, except for a single leg left on the ground. 

Most of the time I have to wave dead feeders and hold the guts to their faces to get my Mantids to eat it, but I guess it depends on the species or individual.

 

[Prayingmantisqueen]

My nymphs will catch dead flies of their screen lid.

 

[The Mantis Menagerie]

Most of my mantids are extremely picky, and they have particular rules as to how food should be presented. First,  they like their prey to move in a certain direction, and it has to be on the ground because they are scared of insects that are at eye-level or above. The second rule is that if they drop a feeder, good luck getting them to finish it (I find a lot of half-eaten but otherwise perfectly good superworms in their tank). Finally, burrowing is an intriguing behavior that must not be disturbed even if it is your lunch that is doing the burrowing (this is how I find random darkling beetles in my mantids' tanks). I have had a couple mantids in the past that were not picky at all, and I could usually persuade them to finish their meals. 

 

[MantisGirl13]

That is pretty funny! The other day I heard a scuffling sound from my mantis closet and my Giant African adult female had leapt to the bottom of her cage and had snatced up a butterfly wing that was at least a month old! (It was a really pretty wing, so I had kept it in there as a decoration) She ate half of it, and then dropped it and scrambled up the wall of her cage back to the roof as if nothing had happened.

- MantisGirl13