One more time Rick!
Arizona is one of the states
not threatened by colony collapse disorder! We have honey bees everywhere. The only thing that pisses me off is to find flowering bushes surrounded by dead bees because someone sprayed with insecticide! Buy AZ honey!
MrPitseleh: "I think that it would be really helpful to new people if a topic was pinned with just pictures on poisonous bugs and things to feed a mantis in it."
Try reading my last post in this thread again, son. Take yr time. Have a snacky half way through. Raisins are good.
Phil, to be fair to MrPitseleh, your post wasn't that helpful.
For starters, millipedes, not centipedes (to my limited knowledge), secrete hydrogen cyanide as a defense.
My reading, and rereading, of your post was that it was wandering. It has many interesting and helpful points, but what it ignores is the main points.
It does not properly address the possibility of hymenoptera stinging in defense. Which they do, I don't think that is up for debate.
"I see no reason why this wasp would risk its life to kill a mantis, except in most unusual circumstances."
If an owner puts a wasp in the cage with a mantid then we can accept that the wasp is in danger. Now, it may be that the mantid can capture and incapacitate the wasp with no chance at all of being stung. I find it unlikely that a mantid is 100% safe in that situation and would not risk it myself.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that a wasp flying around a cage is going to take it upon itself to fly over and sting the mantid. But I suspect many others feel as I do that the wasp may sting the mantid when the mantid attacks it.
If you had any specific reason that the mantid is safe from a wasp's defensive sting you did not present it clearly.
The same goes for poisonous/noxious prey. If you meant to imply that mantids are either not susceptible to poisonous prey at all, ever, of any type, or that they will simply not eat it if they catch it, then you did not make that clear. You do say that they can eat stink bugs and monarch butterflies. Are we intended to extrapolate that to all poisonous/noxious prey?
I suspect that there is a disconnect between what you were thinking and what actually made it to the post. That is hardly MrPitseleh's fault. A simple statement like "there are no defensive chemicals in insects that are dangerous to a mantid" (if that is true) would have been more helpful than a bunch of disjointed facts that may or may not lead us to conclude that you are trying to imply that mantids can eat anything (or won't eat anything they shouldn't).
I honestly mean no disrespect, I enjoy your posts very much. I do not however enjoy your snide comment to MrPitseleh in light of the fact that his confusion is not helped by the disorganized nature of your post.