The Urban Pantheist

We wild-collected two Chinese mantis oothecae (egg masses--pronounced Oh oh thus see!) and kept them in a jar until they hatched.


Once they hatched we let the tiny predators out in the yard, focusing on plants damaged by grazing herbivores. This pathetic maple sapling has been reduced to mush by winter moth caterpillars and aphids. Go to work, babies!


There's something so endearing about these minuscule murderers.


Go forth little one! We'll collect your ootheca if you survive to make any.

Early on Sunday we discovered two charismatic predators in the yard. Neither one is native to North America, which is a little sad-making. I wonder how we could get some Argiope spiders onto the property...


This tiny Chinese mantis hunts on the tops of the sunflower leaves. That's great for now, as it will likely catch mostly pests feeding on the plant. If it is still there later, when the flowers open, the mantis will be something of a pest itself, feeding on pollinators that visit the blossoms.


The clumps of pinpoint baby spiders are gone, and now this 2mm cross orbweaver sits in a web by itself, hopefully catching aphids and whiteflies as they pass along the grapevined fence.

Let's leave the selfie behind and look at a lovely lunch in the butterfly pavilion.

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Chinese mantid Tenodera aridifolia sinensis

This mantid perches on a jar of fruit flies provided as easy prey. It and its many brothers and sisters hatched from an ootheca produced by this large female. Chinese mantids are becoming the most common mantids in North America, due to deliberate releases to control garden pests. I heard of more folks encountering mantids this year than any time since I was a child.

Mantises used to be lumped in the same Order as cockroaches and termites, and the information on Bugguide.net makes it sound like they still should be: "The concept of an order that includes at least cockroaches, termites, and mantids is nowadays widely supported by scientists." Furthermore, mantids "can be reasonably described as predatory roaches."

That last part doesn't quite pass the sniff test for me--the elongated thorax, the mobile head, the raptorial forearms...Even if it is correct taxonomically, it's a violation of the language: calling a mantid a predatory roach robs both words of their meaning.