Will my mantises survive While I am Gone For One Week?

[Mantis Man13]

I plan on having my Dead Leaf mantis get mantis-sat, it is L6, but I have two south carolina mantises that will be molting to adult hood soon. Once they are adults, can they survive for one week without food? I have done this once with a South Carolina mantis before, and I fed her as much as I could and kept a few insects in the cage for her to eat and she survived. Could I do this again?

 

[soundspawn]

If they are adult I would feed them well beforehand, then put some baby carrots and gut loaded crickets in and they'll be just fine. The crickets will stay nutritious and the mantids can snag a few meals while you are gone.

If they are not adult yet I'd worry about crickets messing up their molts... if that is the case only do it if they recently molted so that risk would be really low.

 

[Mantis Man13]

But carrot fed crickets kill mantids. Also, last time I did this with crickets I saw a green stain on the bottom of the terrarium and even though my mantis had no damage, did she get hurt or barf? I know the male is about to mature to adult hood, as its wing buds have been looking puffy for the past few days, but I am not sure about the female. They are both 1 and 6/16 in. big right now. The girl has good sized wing buds, is she on her final molt?

 

[Ranitomeya]

If you feed them well prior to leaving, they should be able to go a week without food unless they're tiny nymphs and they molt while you're gone. Depending on the humidity in your house, they may also be fine without misting for a week. If it's humid, they should be fine for a week without water unless they're a moisture-loving species or if they're tiny nymphs that molt and need a drink after.

You can set up safe feeders while you're gone if you're using fruit flies and fly pupae and maggots. You can set up a small culture of fruit flies that'll hatch out while you're gone if the nymphs are small enough to accept them and you can also set up some maggots and pupae so that flies emerge over time while you're gone. You're also able to put in a few flies into the enclosure and set up a feeding station for the flies so they'll survive long enough to feed the mantis while you're gone.

 

[Mantis Man13]

The girl is sub-adult and so is the boy. They should both be adults before I leave. They are South Carolina mantids. Do they need a lot of moisture?

 

[soundspawn]

Don't tell my shields carrot fed crickets kill them, they won't believe you. Also: http://www.mantispets.com/faqs.html At worst it's controversial but I can personally say it has lead to zero fatalities in my room.

 

[Mantis Man13]

Then why do so many people on the forum tell me about how carrots are bad?

 

[soundspawn]

Then why do so many people on the forum tell me about how carrots are bad?

Well a quick search of these forums shows very few posts about it, one person says it will kill them, I say it never has mine, and a few people repeat it as a rumor, specifically saying things like "I've heard carrot-fed crickets can make mantids sick, but I can't personally verify that." So again I'd say it's maybe a controversy, and I can only speak to my own experience of zero fatalities.

But regardless... at the end of the day, why do so many people say something if it's wrong? That happens all the time, take for example that you just told me carrot fed crickets kill mantids, yet you are just reciting what you heard, and then someone may see your post and believe you; and on and on. A lot of people say the earth is flat (yes even today). People often believe what they read, and sometimes what they read is wrong

 

[mantisman 230]

good question, fruits such as apples are best in my opinion, they work well, are cheap to get, and crickets love them, as for your Carolina mantids, they should be fine without food for a good while after the adult shed, I have two females and a male, all adults, male went for a good number of days without feeding. btw south isn't in the name, just Carolina

 

[Rick]

Carolina mantis, not South Carolina mantis.

 

[soundspawn]

Carolina mantis, not South Carolina mantis.

Maybe it has an accent, you don't know :clown:

 

[Mantis Man13]

Actually, I am going to be gone for 10 days, not 7. Will my mantises still be able to survive?

 

[soundspawn]

If you stock the cage as has been described, they'll last about a week past when the food runs out (more feeders = more time). Again make sure they are adults because you don't want a cricket to mess everything up. You could also have someone check in on them halfway through, mist some drinking water, etc

 

[Aryia]

Carrots are fine as gut-load. I use carrots for all my roaches and crickets, and my mantis collection is still up and well. Myths like that arise when one or two people wrongly correlate the death of one of their mantises to something like carrots. Their mantises may have passed away from all kinds of random things including improper husbandry.

I personally wouldn't leave any crickets in with my mantises. Crickets tend to attack other crickets or even mantises if they get hungry, and mantises are awfully bad at defending themselves (unless they are hungry and want to eat). They can take 7 days without food with a problem. At 10 days they should be pretty hungry but still alright in my opinion, you should check if there are roach vendors around your area. B. Lateralis and Dubia both will not climb plastic so there is no way for them to get to your mantis and bother them, you can safely leave those inside the container (no soil substrate though, they like to hide). Mealworms might work too if your mantis actively hunts them. Crickets in general are just awful, they eat each other even when they are well-fed >.< Or maybe I'm just doing something awfully wrong.

Good luck! You could always swing by and pick a boyfriend up for your girl hehe.

 

[Rick]

Maybe it has an accent, you don't know :clown:

They got that accent up here too!

 

[soundspawn]

Carrots are fine as gut-load. I use carrots for all my roaches and crickets, and my mantis collection is still up and well. Myths like that arise when one or two people wrongly correlate the death of one of their mantises to something like carrots. Their mantises may have passed away from all kinds of random things including improper husbandry.

I personally wouldn't leave any crickets in with my mantises. Crickets tend to attack other crickets or even mantises if they get hungry, and mantises are awfully bad at defending themselves (unless they are hungry and want to eat). They can take 7 days without food with a problem. At 10 days they should be pretty hungry but still alright in my opinion, you should check if there are roach vendors around your area. B. Lateralis and Dubia both will not climb plastic so there is no way for them to get to your mantis and bother them, you can safely leave those inside the container (no soil substrate though, they like to hide). Mealworms might work too if your mantis actively hunts them. Crickets in general are just awful, they eat each other even when they are well-fed >.< Or maybe I'm just doing something awfully wrong.

Good luck! You could always swing by and pick a boyfriend up for your girl hehe.

Great, sound advice. I linked to a Q&A written by a forum member that details the "black death" cricket/carrot debacle. It sounds as though people blamed carrots not yet knowing there was a virus moving through the cricket farms. And thus a myth was born.

Anyway, my advice if you want to keep crickets is egg crate. It's like the lotus plant from the Odyssey. If there is no egg crate they are a disgusting, violent, savage specie of insect that I can't recommend anyone even get near. Add egg crate though and they become quite courteous of one another. Cannibalism drops to virtually zero, except while laying eggs because they leave the egg crate for that. Seriously, add a half carton of egg container to a dozen young crickets and they will easily all live to adulthood and breed. Without egg crate you'd be lucky if four of them made it a week. It has to do with them being insanely territorial and the nooks of the crate give them each dens so they don't get in turf wars anymore. They'll even share nooks, so long as there are plenty to go around. It's the craziest thing.

 

[twolfe]

I travel a lot and am usually take 4 or more 7 – 12 day trips a year. I explained my self-feeding system a few times in the past but couldn't find my posts when I searched.

I set up a self-feeding system in advance. About ten days before I leave I have fresh blue bottle larvae (aka spikes) delivered. (Must be larvae and not pupae.) For adults or larger nymphs, I take bb larvae out of the refrigerator every day for 7 - 8 days and put them in a container on the counter until the day before I leave. Each day I start a new container. The day before I leave, I take the appropriate number of bb larvae/pupae (some have pupated by now) from each container on the counter and add to each enclosure. With this system, every mantis has a continuous supply of flies hatching for about a week. I did this while I was home once to test to see how it works. It worked great except that I had a slightly lower bb hatch rate for ones that were placed in enclosures under heat lamps (b. Mendicas). Just be careful if you have mantids that are close to molting. You may want to reduce the number of bb added or do every other day as too many hatched flies can stress a molting mantis.

For small nymphs that are eating fruit flies, I create smaller fruit fly cultures (16 ounce deli cups) a few weeks in advance. Before I leave, I put these mini cultures in the net enclosures. Instead of leaving the lid off, I cut a small hole in the cloth lid so that the flies can come and go. By the time I go, the culture is producing so that fruit flies are hatching on a regular basis. Still, I add some ffs from another culture and feed them well before I leave. Many of my nymphs are raised in nets. However, some are kept in 80 ounce deli cups. There isn't room to add a mini culture. However, I put the large portion cups with some fruit fly media in the enclosure and add a few extra fruit flies. I put a small hole in the lid for the flies to come and go. The media will dry out fast if it’s kept near a heat lamp.

If mantids aren’t molting, they seem to get enough moisture from the food to survive OK at my house in the summer. We live in different environments. So, every situation is different. If possible, I have someone spray most of my mantids every few days in the winter because it’s quite dry in my house even with a humidifier. If no one was available, I’ve used a drip system for species that require extra humidity for species that were kept in terrariums.