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Praying Mantis — printable fact sheet
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Praying Mantis
Mantis religiosa
The most repeated fact about mantises is the least accurate. Sexual cannibalism is real, but the claim that females routinely bite off the male's head during mating is largely an artefact of early laboratory studies in which starved females were placed in bright cramped arenas u…
Did you know?
- Some larger praying mantis species are known to prey on small birds, frogs, and even lizards, not just insects.
- Mantises are close relatives of cockroaches and termites, not of grasshoppers, and all three sit in the group Dictyoptera. Females lay eggs in a frothy protein mass, the ootheca, which they whip up with their abdomen and which hardens into a weatherproof case that can survive a winter. Larger mantises have been documented catching and eating hummingbirds at feeders, seizing the bird by the head.
What I learned
Draw the praying mantis
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