Carolina Mantis
Way back in 2011, we bought some praying mantis egg cases to hatch out and raise. Those were Chinese Mantids, Tenodera aridifolia, which is the species most commonly sold for pest control. But, as we found out, they require about 6-7 frost-free months to hatch out and mature, which means that they can’t survive year-to-year in most of Michigan (and certainly not up here in the Upper Peninsula). However, there is a species of mantis that is native to Michigan, at least downstate. This is the Carolina Mantis, Stagmomantis carolina. These are the ones that I used to find sometimes when I was a kid in Livingston County. It turns out that, while these aren’t as readily available for purchase as the Chinese Mantids, it is possible to purchase their egg cases online if you look for them. So, that was what we did. I put them in an aquarium with a screen lid and moist straw in the bottom, and they hatched out on June 5, 2021
We fed the hatchlings wingless fruit flies. The big question in my mind was whether it was even in principle possible to establish a population of mantids around Houghton, so I put the aquarium on the back porch so that they would be exposed to the normal temperature range for Houghton. They did fine, and after they had molted a few times we let almost all of them go before they turned cannibalistic. I then subdivided the aquarium into sections with window screen, and kept a few to see how long it would take them to mature.
Finally, around October 1, two of the mantids finally went through their final molt to get their wings, and this is what they looked like on October 10, 2021.
So, the answer is, 5 months to go from hatchling to mature, and at least one frost-free month to hatch. So, we would need six months from last frost in the spring, to first frost in the fall, before they would have any chance of establishing a breeding population here. It would be possible, but pretty tight timing, so overall I think it is unlikely.
Anyway, these mantids are only about 2/3 as long as the Chinese Mantis was. Both of the ones that reached maturity turned out to be male, so there was no question of breeding them to get eggs for next year.
Here’s a closeup of the “raptorial foreleg”, that they use to catch prey with.
They kept making threat displays at my camera, waving their forelegs at me.
A lot of pictures didn’t come out because they kept grabbing the end of the lens and crawling up on the camera. After feeding them, though, they had their hands full and kind of ignored me.
And here’s a picture of one of their heads.
In spite of all the threat displays, they seemed to be incapable of actually harming me. I kept picking them off of the camera, and they would poke at me with their legs, but they couldn’t break my skin and it just kind of tickled. It is possible that if they had gotten their mouth onto my skin they could have given me a bite, but that didn’t actually happen.
So, anyway, given the time it takes for even the most cold-tolerant species to mature, it looks like the only way to see mantids in northern Michigan is to hatch egg cases from elsewhere, or maybe to grow them in a big greenhouse[1].
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[1] This is actually something that I’ve thought about – get a large, abandoned building, and turn it into a “Sun Dome” like what Ray Bradbury had in the story The Long Rain. The idea in that story was to keep colonists from going mad on a planet where it never stopped raining. The Sun Domes would have a big lamp acting as an artificial sun, so that inside the dome it would simulate a warm, sunny day and allow people to forget the rain for a while. We have a similar problem here, with the skies going overcast and more or less continuous snowfall from the end of November to about the end of March, and people get kind of stir-crazy from the cold and dark and snow right around the middle of February. So, we could make a building that is essentially a well-lit greenhouse containing a park, and stock it with appropriate plants and insect life, so that people could get a break from the winter. And we could include mantids!
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