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
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.
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