All Fear The Mantis

1914

Remarkable Attitude of Prayer While In Wait for Prey

Most persons know the praying mantis — that large, greenish, grasshopper-like insect which holds up adoring arms as if venerating some deity of the woods, or making an invocation — an oracle among insects, as the old Greeks thought it. But these attitudes of prayer conceal the most atrocious habits; these supplicating arms, to fall into Fabre's picturesque phrasing, are lethal weapons; these fingers tell no rosaries, but exist to seize the passer-by.

Although a member of a vegetarian family, the mantis feeds exclusively upon its living prey. It is a tiger in ambush; and if only it had sufficient strength its ogrish appetite and its horrible facility of concealment by color and form among the green leaves where peaceful insects travel would make it the terror of the countryside.

At first glance it does not look very terrible. Its neck is flexible and it can turn its head and look with sharp eyes all directions, but no formidable jaws affright a victim. In its powerful uplifted forelimbs lies the hidden, danger, the cruel trap. Each long thigh, shaped like a flattened spindle, carries on the forward half of its lower face a double row of steely spines, alternately long and short; and three needlelike spikes, longest of all, rise behind the parallel rows, between which the fore leg lies when folded in "prayer." This fore part of the leg is similarly armed, but with smaller spikes, and terminates in a hook with a blade like a pruning knife and a tip as sharp as a needle. Handle the insect incautiously, and this armament discovers itself to you instantly, thrusting its needles and blades into your flesh gripping you in a stinging vise and forcing you to crush it to get free.

When the mantis is in repose these weapons are folded and pressed against the chest, showing nothing of their ferocity. The bandit's sword is sheathed and it seems at its devotions. But let a victim come within reach and the ruse — if ruse it be — is abandoned like a flash. The three long joints of the deadly forelimbs straighten and shoot out their talons, which strike the victim like the unsheathed claws of a cat and drag it back between the saws of the thighs. The vise closes with an upward motion, as a man would bring his hand up to his shoulder, and no cricket, grasshopper, beetle or spider can struggle out of the crook of that terrible elbow. — Harper's Weekly.