Greetings, this contest is for a very special mystery prize for the first person to guess what's missing from this picture. IF you comme...

Recently dug up a short clip of Shagrat, short but with good detail. All grown up and ready to rumble. Part of the Mantis Report crew, along...

I dug this clip up of the original transfer of the fruit flies at the beginning of the whole process.

Shagrat the 1st, so named after an orc of like coloring from Lord of the Rings, the last of this year's mantises, was let go today, and ...

A couple of poses - the picture below shows how the manti sometimes hang out with their arms fully extended: In this shot, we see the bizarr...

Gorbag is now 3 inches long and is not as much of a spaz as Shagrat, but is having fun. It's very interesting to see the finer detail of...

Sorry it's been so long; a lot has happened in the past month. The second generation of mantises grew up; some passed on into the otherw...

So the little monster is getting bigger now. And it appears that the manti are sort of gooped up in their exoskeleton, and when they shed it...

The big news is that the 2nd egg case hatched. I didn't quite get a clear photo, but you can at least get a sense of how the mantis nymp...

(copied over from June 16th entry of Sunflower Report 2.0) Ok, so I wanted to try raising praying mantises before I made the connection that...

Insects such as praying mantises have exoskeletons, which is basically an outer shell, made up of a material called chitin. And if I underst...

Chuck Isdale, photographer extraordinaire, didn't hesitate to take the camera where no camera has gone before. One step forward for all ...

This morning, the praying mantis egg case hatched unexpectedly! Theoretically the small nymphs are letting their exoskeletons harden. Quite ...

Today the mantis egg case and some separate vials with wingless fruit fly culture arrived.