100 More Species #40: Slender mantisfly

Slender mantisfly Leptomantispa pulchella with unidentified passenger.

I stared at my photos for a long time, and looked at the bugguide.net criteria for identifying Mantidflies for a long time. I'm prepared for my bug buddies to tell me I'm wrong, but I think I've got this one. A mantidfly (or mantisfly, which feels nicer to say) is neither mantid nor fly, but instead belongs to the group of insects that includes lacewings and antlions.

These are really neat little animals that I'd love to study more. They are less than a half-inch long, but are tough predators in their world. Those raptorial forelegs snatch up smaller insects just as those of a true mantid. And their development from egg to adult goes through one more stage than insects with "complete" metamorphosis--they have hypermetamorphosis.

If I have the species right, the life cycle goes something like this: after hatching, the very active larva seeks out a female spider and climbs on board, drinking her haemolymph. (Apparently they can parasitize male spiders too, but have to make the transfer when the spiders are mating.) Then as the spider makes her egg case, the mantisfly larva crawls in, changes into a sedentary grub, and feeds on spider eggs. Out from the egg case hatches not spiderlings but an adult mantisfly.

Isn't nature grand?

New Podcast up

I have amazed myself and probably no one else by meeting my own arbitrary deadline. Behold! A new episode of my podcast, which you can listen to at the new website for the podcast. If you know how to do such thing you can acquire an RSS feed of the podcast there.

If you are the downloading type, you may be better served by the Soundcloud link.

Unfortunately we still haven't figured out an easy way to get it on iTunes. It reminds me of when I published a comic book, and was trying to get it distributed. At that time, and now for all I know, there was one giant monolith of a distributor that all comic book stores dealt with. If you couldn't convince them to distribute your comic, you were basically out of luck. I managed to get Tower Records to take a handful of them, but I mostly took them directly to comic book stores to sell them on a consignment basis. Publishing that comic book cost me thousands of dollars over five years.

A podcast is a pretty easy thing to make, it turns out. You don't have to be terribly tech-savvy to record it and mix it down (I'm sure it would be better if I was). It turns out that if you would like to reach a broad audience, you do need to reach one major distributor, and we haven't overcome that step. It seems silly now, and it will seem sillier once we are doing it correctly.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, if you do please share it with your friends, if you have a criticism please share it with me. (So far the only criticism I've received is that the theme music is too New Age/NPR).