- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you go hungry.
Take the case of the huge jumping spider (a female Phidippus audax or bold jumping spider, as identified by Wade Spencer of the UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology) hanging out in our Spanish lavender. Hey, pretend I'm not here! It stealthily crawls up and down the stems, blending into the shadows. It summits the flowers, looking for bees. Where are the bees? Where is my dinner?
The predator and the prey. The hunter and the hunted. The jumping spider, with four pairs of eyes. The honey bee with five eyes (two large compound eyes and three smaller ocelli eyes). The jumping spider's bite is venom. The honey bee's sting is venom.
If they meet, it will be deadly. The spider will shoot venom in the bee, paralyzing it.
Meanwhile, the honey bees are buzzing from flower to flower, some oblivious to the dark shadow lurking near them. No ambush today.
Sometimes you go hungry.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's one of the most recognizable of all insects--if you can find it.
Ever had someone poke you and point toward a plant: "Look, there's a praying mantis?"
"Where?"
"Right there. See it?"
"No. Where is it?
"Right there. It's right there. Can't you see it?"
"No."
People aren't the only ones who can't see it. Neither can their prey, including honey bees, bumble bees, sweat bees, long-horned bees and assorted butterflies. Praying mantids are so camouflaged that they look like part of the plant.
We recently spotted a praying mantis clinging to our broad-leafed milkweed, Asclepias speciosa. The milkweed is meant for monarchs, their host plant, but it's also occupied by many guests, including lady beetles (aka ladybugs), lacewings, aphids, carpenter bees, honey bees, milkweed bugs, moths and spiders.
The praying mantis checked out the milkweed as people would a restaurant menu. It crawled along in the shadows, emerged into the sunshine, and crawled back into the shadows again, before summitting the plant.
It caught no prey. But it did look. A monarch circled the milkweed and fluttered off, heading toward a narrow-leafed milkweed. A lady beetle scurried down a leaf. A milkweed bug slipped behind a leaf.
And the aphids, well, they kept on eating.
The ever-patient praying mantis, with its elongated body, spiked forelegs, long antennae, and triangular head, complete with bulging compound eyes, is like no other insect. It's an ambush predator, totally equipped to be a predator and snag prey in a split second. Thankfully, it's not interested in us!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's a sin to kill a mockingbird, wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee in her classic novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird."
"Mockingbirds don't do one thing except make music for us to enjoy," one of her characters, Miss Maudie, wisely observed. "They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corn cribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
Harper Lee's work came to mind yesterday when we saw a praying mantis devouring a monarch butterfly on our butterfly bush, located next to several milkweed plants. We watched the clipped monarch wings flutter down and land among the leaves.
It was a female monarch. She may have stopped to sip some nectar during her egg-laying mission. The hungry predator ambushed her.
The shock of seeing a delicate monarch gripped between spiked forelegs stuns you, especially when you've just reared two monarchs and have two more to go.
"Umm, do you mind?" we wanted to ask the mantis. "Please eat the cabbage white butterflies, stink bugs and aphids, not the monarchs."
Praying mantids are considered beneficial insects, but all we've seen them eat are honey bees, sunflower bees, butterflies and an occasional Gulf Fritillary caterpillar. However, they do eat ants, wasps, flies, and moths, as well. The larger praying mantids prey on hummingbirds.
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation summed up the monarch decline well on its website: "Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) of North America are renowned for their long-distance seasonal migration and spectacular winter gatherings in Mexico and California. The monarch butterfly population has recently declined to dangerously low levels. In the 1990s, estimates of up to one billion monarchs made the epic flight each fall from the northern plains of the U.S. and Canada to sites in the oyamel fir forests north of Mexico City, and more than one million monarchs overwintered in forested groves on the California Coast. Now, researchers and citizen scientists estimate that only about 56.5 million monarchs remain, representing a decline of more than 80% from the 21 year average across North America."
Okay, praying mantis. We know. It was only one. You have to eat, too. You needed the protein to lay your ootheca. But have you ever considered how tasty and prevalent cabbage white butterflies are?
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Broken Wing belongs here.
And that's a good thing, because he won't live long.
A male monarch that we've nicknamed “Broken Wing” due to a predator mark, hangs out on our milkweed, butterfly bush and Mexican sunflower (Tithonia). He's probably looking for a meal and a mate. Not necessarily in that order.
Scrub jays watch Mr. Danaus plexippus zigzag over the garden and try to nail him. Missed! Hey, didn't you get the message that monarchs don't taste good?
One scub jay, oblivious to the crippled butterfly, perched on our cherry-laurel lined fence today with an acorn in its mouth. Better that than our butterfly.
Praying mantids in our yard would like to make a meal of Broken Wing, too, along with ants, wasps, and dragonflies, not to mention Jeremiah, the American bullfrog that resides in our fish pond.
One thing's for sure: Broken Wing won't be migrating to an overwintering spot in Santa Cruz or Pacific Grove any time soon. He won't be migrating anywhere.
One of the casualties of predator-prey interactions..,
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The hummingbirds seemed apprehensive.
They'd fly to the feeder, stop in mid-air, and turn back.
What was keeping them from the feeder?
A closer look revealed what the casual observer wouldn't notice: a praying mantis.
Was the mantis a predator or the prey? Hummingbirds eat insects, and the larger mantids eat hummingbirds.
We waited to see what would happen next.
A hummer opted to take a drink. The praying mantis, sprawled out on the feeder in a position we've never seen before, didn't move.
It later moved to another spot on the feeder.
The next morning, no mantis. Gone.
Maybe it moved to another location. Or maybe another predator nailed it.
Meanwhile, check out a photo published in National Geographic that shows a praying mantis grasping a hummer. It's not for the squeamish.
And YouTube shows numerous videos of mantids attacking hummers. Watch this video of multiple hummers trying to dodge a praying mantis.
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