The restricted diet thread:

[gm88]

Does anyone find that more or less feeding affect the rate of molting? I have heard some people say a restricted diet helps improve life-span, but from experience I know that captive mantises can also grown to much smaller adults. Also I was wondering if anyone had any insight as to the behavior of mantises in captivity. Are they more prone to "over-eating" if fed regularly? Should you keep feeding them even if their abdomen looks full?

Here's an article I found on the subject from a study done on caloric-restriction and life span in Rhesus monkeys: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140401/ncomms4557/full/ncomms4557.html

 

[Jay]

Hi there and thanks for the question. I'll tell you what I understand, mainly based on my experience.

You can read in other places in the forum concerning the effects of feeding amounts and temperatures affecting lifespan. If you feed a mantis a lot and keep your mantid at a higher temperature he/she will tend to mature a little faster.

As it goes with feeding or feeding too much, my experience has been that different mantids are affected differently by feeding. You might be able to feed one kind of mantis (my experience: Spiny flowers) until they bulge, without an issue - while another kind (my experience: Ghosts) can become severely injured if over-fed (especially the adult females). Though I have heard that some individuals force-feed their mantids, I have never done this and feel that this is a waste of time and effort unless you possess an injured mantis that is close to his/her next molt.

As for the link, It is incredibly difficult to say that how much the Rhesus monkey article (concerning a vertebrate) has any bearing on a mantis (an invertebrate). :huh: