Illustration Dave » Mantids

Feed Me Seymor!

dmiles — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 02:01:00 +0000

While I was pretty interested in the whole Mantis raising experiment I had no idea how feeding would work. I’m finding that it takes a little creative problem solving . Baby mantids can only eat fruit flies or other insects of that size. They just aren’t large enough to wrangle anything else in the early phases of development. Anyway, I had to shell out about $20 for a few tubes of fruit flies and those only lasted about 5 weeks… Soon Slim grew larger so I was able to move up to pinhead crickets… those too cost about $20 per box of 250-500. By now you can see that this is a becoming more of an investment than a pet . So this weekend I was wondering how the kid in me used to catch flies and bugs and keep them for ‘study’. Fireflies seemed like the easiest to catch so I put a few in Slim’s jar and he avoided them. My answer came during a trip to the grocery store in search of hotdogs. In one of the aisles was a display of bamboo handled bug nets! Now I’m able to reduce the house fly population and feed my pet at the same time! Two jobs in one .

Fierce! (IF)

dmiles — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:47:00 +0000

Illustration Friday has a weekly competition / drawing exercise on the their website. They invite anyone to create and post a piece of artwork based on a weekly theme. Every Friday they select one from all of the entries and feature it on their web page. I have yet to enter anything but this week the theme is ‘Fierce’. It seems like the perfect opportunity to do a quick Mantis update!!

When last we heard from the Mantids I had a huge buggy family on my hands in as little as an hour when the egg case hatched. Quickly I decided to save 2 of them in separate containers and let the rest go in some shrubbery outside.

I started feeding them fruit flies and soon they were getting pretty big! Since their skin is rigid they need to molt it regularly and let their bodies expand. Super cool and pretty gross . Their bodies are kind-of shiny and soft looking after molting and it seems to take a few hours for them to stiffen up again. Unfortunately one of my Mantids had a molting accident and got kind-of tangled up in his own skin. He sat on the floor of his cage for over night and so, in an effort to save him, I tried to perform emergency surgery and cut him free. Alas it was not to be. He was too far gone and had to be flushed .

Mantis number two, whom I’ve named ‘Slim Jim’, is still alive and is a little over an inch long now. He just molted today and he’s look especially ‘Fierce!’

I found an article today about a Mantis that caught a humming bird!!! It’s cool although not for the faint of heart. Click the link at your own risk!

Baby Mama

dmiles — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0000

Yikes!

A few weeks ago was my birthday! It was so great. I’m another year older, I got to spend time with family and friends, and my fiance’, Carrie, gave me some Mantis egg sacks. How odd you might say . Well, I really love odd things and she knows me so well! Honestly, I was a little creeped out at first but it was the good kind of creepiness.

Anyway, I got a little stick and attached the sacks to the stick inside of a little container and waited for the inevitable. Within a few weeks those little mantids started to wriggle and squirm out of the eggs and had soon filled the inside of my little fish bowl.

From that point on I had to make so many decisions about the future of my little babies… do I leave them be and let them eat each other hoping that the strongest would survive? Should I let a bunch go hoping they would be able to fend for themselves?

Stay tuned for further updates…