i noticed that the male mantis sometimes will not or prob dont eat as much as a female does as i observed one of my females ate a large house fly easily and fed the male a similar fly and he did eat like half of it then discarded the rest of it so i tend to think sometimes the male mantis is not as much of a eater as the females are!
wasted meals
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NO, u r rite! they are not interested in food, give them a drink each day, but dont worry when they dont eat each day.
d17oug18
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i was wondering the same thing lol! my male either has not eatin at all or eats very lil at night, sense he molted to adult, knowing this eases my pained thoughts =)
jameslongo
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From what I gathered from previous topics, males eat less than females because:
1) Males are smaller than females
2) Males don't lay ooths
3) Males need to be light enough to fly
1) Males are smaller than females
2) Males don't lay ooths
3) Males need to be light enough to fly
Nymphe
Member
You feed you adult females daily? What species? What size of prey?
I feed my Sphodromantis viridis females once a week with an adult locust or Dubia roach, one extra after they laid an ooth. Anything more and they'd explode! (Or rather just drop a half eaten, still wiggling roach, yum.)
I feed more in those three or four weeks between the last moult and mating, to fatten them up, but even then it's every other day at the most.
jameslongo
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Once a week? That is far to infrequent unless the meal is huge. I feed gravid adult females daily in general. That is all species. Average size prey. If I find a bird grasshopper or a cidada and they eat the whole thing then yes I will skip a day.
jameslongo
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Hey Rick, next time you catch a Bird Grasshopper, put a pic up, if you would. Doesn't sound like one of God's designs
well i try to feed mine every day but i think i need to be more practical as i bought like 4 dozen small crickets recently and less then 3-4 days i had used them all up to feed my mantids as i did not think they were that small till i looked at them and wow the crickets were as big as my smallest gambian nymph and i have 9 nymphs!
Nymphe
Member
Why do you think so?
Well yes, it is - like I wrote, it's adult Dubia roaches and locusts usually. If I happen to catch a fly in the room or need to get rid of a mis-moulted phasmid or mantid nymph they sometimes get a treat in between, but not regularly.
And it's not as if my mantids look like they're starving, really (Pic and another).
PhilinYuma
Well-known member
It's hard to argue with the evidence! How do you feed nymphs in the first few instars?
Nymphe
Member
Much more frequently of course ... there are always plenty of fruit flies in the enclosure as long as I keep them together. I seperate them at fourth instar and then drop in a couple of house or green bottle flies every other day or so (unless they look like they're about to moult).
d17oug18
Well-known member
when there adults i just fill the cage with food lol i dont know if this is smart or not but i figure if there not going to shed then they have nothing to worry about, my male eats like half a fly once a week and my female eats a large cricket and 1 fly almost per DAY! shes a hungery baby ^_^ my thought is also that they know not to eat when there not hungery and i dont like flies all up in my room lol so i just pop all of them in lol
superfreak
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large, less frequent meals are the ideal. the mantid gets more energy input for energy output in catching the meal. this is of course not natural, as they usually arent living in the 'ideal' outside
PhilinYuma
Well-known member
Darn! I was sure that someone was going to react to Superfreak's outrageous thesis that we mere humans can provide a mantis with conditions more close to the ideal than Mother Nature. I guess that there are not as many Mother Nature fans out there as I thought, but that won't stop me from pontificating.large, less frequent meals are the ideal. the mantid gets more energy input for energy output in catching the meal. this is of course not natural, as they usually arent living in the 'ideal' outside
She's absolutely right, of course. Food intake vs. prey capture energy expenditure is a crucial issue for all animal predators. Mantids, though, have become specially adapted for retaining exceptionally large meals. In most insects, the crop, which stores food prior to digestion in the midgut, ends at the posterior end of the thorax. In the mantis it extends to the third abdominal segment or thereabouts. It is usually argued that this is because mantids are opportunistic predators, who need to be able to retain large meals on occasion, but it could be equally well argued that they have become accustomed to taking large prey, such as the skinks that Superfreak has mentioned, newts (Prete p.18), and hummingbirds as a survival mechanism, and that this behavior is only limited by their ability to find and capture such large prey. It has been suggested that the inability of mantids to assess prey density in their area and their consequent failure to move to a more productive one, together with the absence of any physiological mechanism, such as the slowing of the respiration rate during periods of starvation, suggest that mantids may have evolved at a time when small prey was more abundant (as Inoue among others has suggested) and have since failed to adapt to long periods of starvation except by taking relatively very large prey when they can and by developing an abnormally large crop.
Nymphe's feeding regimen for her adult mantids may be an extreme though effective example of the "large meal given at long intervals" regimen, but Yager's lab (cf Prete p. 313) feeds enough food for two days twice a week, leaving three "starvation days."
So yes, mantids in the wild have less than "ideal" access to prey, and in our bug rooms, we can improve on Mother Nature!
I'm not sure that anyone will be particularly interested in reading this, but I had fun writing it! Thanks, Superfreak
Nymphe
Member
Hehe, I thought it was interesting.
That feeding regimen was recommended to me by the breeder I got my mantids from, so it had been tested before.
Good to know the biological theory behind it!
