Visitor - Mantis

[shawnintland]

Here's an interseting visitor to my neps. I have been wondering how and why I seem to keep finding big preying mantisii (?) inside my shade houses and how they manage to get in. Yesterday I got an answer to the 'why' part. I video taped this guy/gal sucking up the nectar from a couple pitcher peristomes and lids. They have a very efficient mouth and moved along one rib at a time all the way around the peristome before moving up to the lid glands! Unfortunately, the videos are something like 77 MB each and I don't have a you-tube account/experience...any hints are welcome.





;D
~Shawn

[marvin1997]

Wow you've got scorpion in your neps and now mantids?Your surroundingg is forest?So good

[Robert]

with them around to pick up crawlers and flies your neps are assured to be healthy.

[alcran]

Hmm, I didn't know that mantids drank necter.

[cbkhoon]

does it bite the pitchers or leaves ?

[shawnintland]

Marvin - there's lots of coconut plantation land all around me, mostly undisturbed except for the coco harvesting every few months. Plenty of bugs, snakes and animals!

Robert - I've always been happy to see them inside the shade houses and never chased them out. I did worry that they might not find enough to eat inside but figured that they must 'want' to get inside as no other bugs even half their size manage to do so.

Alcran - Me either! Today I also watched a cloud of mosquitoes sucking jucies from a bunch of individual female nep flowers!

cbkhoon - Watching it close up I realized that no, it doesn't eat the leaves at all. The mouth has its own apparatus that is like a little machine with fingers selecting what it wants and shoveling it into the mouth. He/she seemed to just move along one groove after the other and then moved on to the underside of the lid. I will have to open a you-tube account and post the video.
~Shawn

[marvin1997]

SNAKES!!!!!!!!I want one So any fall in to the neps?

[alienfx]

As far as i know mantis are predator insects.They will hunt other smaller insects.

[Vincent]

i caught one last year and put it in a greenhouse that i made in my living room. I went to the pet shop and would hand feed it crickets. 2 months later, i went in to check on her after school, and it was in the process of making an opus, or egg sack under a leaf of nepenthes sanguinea! couple days later, she died. In the spring i cut off nepenthes leaf and put the opus in our field of tiger lillies. They are really neat to have around, and alienfx is right, they eat harmful pests, just like lady bugs.

[shawnintland]

Yep, I understand about their carnivorous habits but after filming this one for quite a while I feel that they must also enjoy a nectar desert course as well. There's no doubt that it was eating something other than bugs while licking the peristome and lid glands. Vincent - yes I find egg sacks all over the nursery. I find that if I put split bamboo poles stuck into the ground next to plants as stakes, the mantis tend to lay their eggs on them. I often move the whole stake around to somewhere where there is a 'bug problem' before they hatch out.