PRAYING MANTIS

Why keep a mantis
A 'praying mantis' is an excellent and attractive exotic pet. Mantids are cheap and relatively easy to keep.

Feeding
All species of mantis are predatory and will feed solely on living insects (adults of some species can occasionally be fed meat and dead insects.) The mantis is an incredible hunter, they have excellent eyesight and spot insects moving over two meters away! Mantids will tackle prey up to their own size, as a general rule though, most species will do best when fed on insects roughly quarter to half their size.

A mantis will actually tackle any invertebrate small enough, adults of some species will eat small frogs, lizards, snakes, rodents and even birds. In captivity a diet of fruit flies when young (usually first three castes), moving on too young crickets and locusts as size increases. To put some variety into a captive mantis diet mealworms, blow fly, grasshoppers, moths, butterflies and hover flies all make excellent food items. Avoid aggressive invertebrates such as ants, wasps, bees, spiders etc as these may fight back against your mantis.

Live food is simply placed in the mantis tank, if the mantis is hungry, it will catch and eat prey. Food items (assuming the are 1/4 the size of the mantis) are fed a few times a week. You can actually see how fat a mantis is, it's abdomen (the bit at the back), swells when well fed.

Overfeeding is equally dangerous to neglecting feeding duties. Learn you mantids feeding pattern, if it's eager to feed then feed it, keeping feeding it until it loses interest, then you know it can go another few days before needing to be fed again. Live food such as crickets can be aggressive towards a mantis, when moulting they are particularly vulnerable  to the cricket 'nibbling' limbs etc, this will result in the mantis failing to moult. Do not have numerous food items running around, this is also thought to stress the mantis.

Sizes
As well as a variety of colours, mantids come in a range of sizes. First stage nymphs of all mantis species are less than 5mm long, but some species reach adult sizes over 110mm in length! At each instar a mantid will shed its 'skin', this is the process of moulting. When a mantis moults it sheds an old exoskeleton so it can continue to grow. This process stops once the mantis reaches adult size.

Humidity
Humidity is basically the amount of air moisture. This is an important factor for young mantids of tropical origin. As a general rule, mist spray a mantids enclosure a few times a week, this is good practise and assists in the moulting process. Humidity should be maintained at around 60% for many species.

Temperature
Mantids come from all over the world. Species from Europe and some of the United States can be kept at room temperature with no additional heating (as low as 18°c), others benefit from higher temperatures around 25°c to 30°c which are achieved using a heat mat.