This years finds. Very unexpected...

[Domanating]

I have been in north of Portugal for a week and went hunting for some praying mantis. I was amazed with the amount of males i found but i didn't see one single female which is quite odd. I caught 5 males which aint bad but i was planning to catch 3 females and 3 males. One particular village i visited was full of males and they were easily found climbing houses and walls at night time. Even though i had 5 new mantis is was frustrated for the lack of females. The weather didn't help much too. This was the worst summer i ever had with lots of windy days, rain and cold weather.

Here are my finds:

Very interesting colors on this one. Darker than usual brown mantis religiosa.

Yellow-brown mantis. Not a very common color for this species

Two common green males. Although they are from the same species, the left one is a bit smaller than the right one.

Interesting however, is this species. Not like the species above, which are all mantis religiosa, this one is an Iris Oratoria, characterized by it's "eyed" wings and a light orange spot on the lower part of the abdomen. A very weird find in this region. What amazed me the most was the red-green-yellow-orange color pattern. It is quite crippled. Only 1 leg and one claw are fully functional. However it is pretty active and feeds a lot better than the mantis religiosa.

 

[sppc9876]

I used to make annual trips to Salt Lake City with my parents years ago. There was this hotel out from the city that we stayed at which attracted hundreds of European mantises. I would always catch a couple before I left. You reminded me about something that seemed a bit strange about the ones I caught this one time. I had two females both which were adults but one was almost a full inch bigger than the other. It was as if the smaller one skipped a whole molt or something. I wish I had pictures at that time but my divider in my cage fell over and the smaller one got eaten. Anyone ever seen such a big size discrepancy in adults of the same species?

 

[gripen]

beautiful European. alas i am stuck with chinese where i live.

 

[Domanating]

I used to make annual trips to Salt Lake City with my parents years ago. There was this hotel out from the city that we stayed at which attracted hundreds of European mantises. I would always catch a couple before I left. You reminded me about something that seemed a bit strange about the ones I caught this one time. I had two females both which were adults but one was almost a full inch bigger than the other. It was as if the smaller one skipped a whole molt or something. I wish I had pictures at that time but my divider in my cage fell over and the smaller one got eaten. Anyone ever seen such a big size discrepancy in adults of the same species?

I have an abnormally small adult male Mantis religiosa preserved in a jar from last year. I found it weird too. here's a comparison between the the abnormal one (right) and a normal sized male (left). And yeah the abnormal male didn't die from old age but had his head partially eaten by that same mantis on the left. My bad

 

[Domanating]

beautiful European. alas i am stuck with chinese where i live.

Don't lose hope, i thought i was stuck with the European Mantis Religiosa when i came up with the Iris Oratoria. I got pretty excited! I have to thank a friend of mine for capturing it for me as a birthday gift believe it or not

 

[PeterF]

Around here the first wave of adults is usually smaller than the adults that come later.

 

[Peter Clausen]

Our European mantises out here in Oregon come in all those colors and a sort of metallic gray too. I have to guess that all the colors are present in all the populations of them everywhere. Nice trip account!

 

[Domanating]

Yesterday i did a 4 hour hunt for female praying-mantis and i ended up finding a deformed dwarf sized male... Worse than that was finding nothing. The cold weather clearly affected the number of praying mantis in this region...