Photo of the Week – September 22, 2017

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The Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) is an impressive creature.  Introduced to North America, it has certainly made itself at home here.  Entomologists I’ve talked to express varying levels of concern about the presence of the Chinese mantis – as well as the narrow-winged mantis (Tenodera angustipennis) and European mantis (Mantis religiosa).  Most would rather those non-native mantises not be here, but say it’s hard to find strong evidence that they are doing measurable harm to the ecosystems they’ve moved into.  If anyone knows of research that has defined the impacts of these non-native mantises I’d love to hear about it.

The Chinese mantis comes in either grayish-brown, green, or a combination of green and brown.

Regardless of impact, Chinese mantises are fascinating animals, as are our native mantises like the Carolina mantis (Stagmomantis carolina).   While I was out taking pictures last weekend, I ran across three different Chinese mantises and captured the images in this post.  I think they show some of the various attributes of these amazing (and possibly harmful) creatures.

A Chinese mantis feeds on a captured hover fly.  Lincoln Creek Prairie, Aurora, Nebraska.

Seen from underneath, the mouth of the mantis is really otherworldly.  Praying mantises can turn their head 180 degrees – a unique attribute among insects.  That ability helps them scan for both prey and predators.

“Do you mind? I’m eating here…”

This mantis was finishing off a skipper butterfly (a Sachem?) while hanging beneath the flowers of pitcher sage (Salvia azurea).

The “pupils” in the big compound eyes of mantids are actually pseudopupils, and are a trick of the light rather than an actual structure.  Look at the location of the pseudopupil in the earlier photo showing the underside of a mantis’ head…

The mantis in this photo is not looking in a different direction than in the above photo, but the angle of light hitting the eyes makes it look that way.

One additional attribute of praying mantises, especially the big ones, is that they are noticed by the general public, including kids.  I spent last Friday helping with a prairie-based field day for 5th graders, and my job was to get the students interested in invertebrates.  We used sweep nets to catch inverts, and the kids got to catch and hold grasshoppers, katydids, and spiders.  Moving kids from “Spiders are icky!” to “Ha ha – this spider tickles when it walks on my hand!” is a really important process.  If we want people to understand the value of invertebrates, they first have to see them as something other than icky.  In that regard, the absolute star of the day was a big Chinese mantis one of the kids found early in the day.  I kept it and showed it to each group of students I visited with during the day, and it never failed to get oohs and aahs from them.  Everyone got to touch it, and it was big enough that we could easily talk about it’s various body parts, how it hunts, etc.  As an ambassador for invertebrate kind, it was very effective.  An important gateway bug, if you will.

Corrected/Updated Information on the Painted Lady Migration Post

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Well, about an hour after I published today’s blog post on the painted lady migration, I received an email response from Royce Bitzer (Iowa State University) which answered some questions I’d sent him earlier in the week.  I’d waited for his responses before posting, but finally decided to just go ahead with the information I had.

Dr. Bitzer provided one main piece of information that was different from what I’d originally said in my post, which is that there isn’t any evidence that the big super bloom of wildflowers in California spurred the migration.  He was surprised by that, but said that based on reports from the Las Vegas, NV and Albuquerque, NM areas, this year’s high numbers of migrating butterflies likely came from places near those reports, rather than from further west in California.

A little bit of additional information from Dr. Bitzer…   There is no evidence that painted ladies (or red admiral butterflies) can overwinter around here, so the butterflies we see during the summer get here through migration.  The painted ladies in my backyard now are likely a combination of butterflies that hatched out here (descendants of migrants) and others that are passing through from further north.  He’s been trying to track reports of movement over the last several weeks, and it appears that the big southern migration started over Labor Day weekend (Sept 2-4) when a cold front swept butterflies out of Canada and into the Dakotas.  Since then they’ve been moving further south, reaching Iowa and Nebraska.  They are joining up with already-present large populations that had hatched out here before the migrants arrived.

Anyway, I apologize for a second post on this topic, but I wanted to be sure I was providing the best information I could.  The original post has now been edited to make it more correct.