- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
So you want to capture an image of a praying mantis.
You have to find one first.
Sometimes it's a case of hide 'n seek--it hides, you seek.
Mantises, or mantids, are camouflaged. Many camouflaged (cryptic) insects are "sit-and-wait predators," write emeritus professors Penny Gullan and Peter Cranston of the University of California, Davis, in the fourth edition of their popular textbook, The Insects, An Outline of Entomology, published by Wiley-Blackwell.
"(Crypyic insects)...may be defensive, being directed against highly visual predators such as birds, rather than evolved to mislead invertebrate prey," they write. "Cryptic predators modeled on a feature that is of no interest to the prey (such as tree bark, lichen, a twig or even a stone) can be distinguished from those that model on a feature of some significance to prey, such as a flower that acts as an insect attractant."
But we inadvertently discovered there's at least one good way to flush out a praying mantis--water your garden. It will hurriedly emerge.
This praying mantis (below), lurking on a tomato plant, apparently didn't like the burst of water that disturbed its stakeout.
It licked the water droplets from its forelegs--legs specialized to seize prey--and then flew to a nearby tree.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
They're Down Under and on deadline.
Entomology professors Penny Gullan and Peter Cranston of the University of California, Davis, are finishing the fourth edition of their popular textbook, The Insects: An Outline of Entomology.
They're not in
Their textbook is a veritable Who's Who and What's What of the study of insects. One reviewer wrote: "This established textbook continues to provide a comprehensive and stimulating introduction to insects, a group of animals that represent over half of the planet's biological diversity. It commences with a review of the significance of insects, their immense diversity and their patterns of distribution. Insects influence all of our activities, and in seeking to understand their success, the key features of insect anatomy, physiology, behaviour, ecology, phylogeny and evolution are identified by the authors."
Their book was also mentioned in a recent Smithsonian article featuring the Linnaean Games, a national insect trivia contest conducted at the annual Entomological Society of America meeting. In the Linnaean Games, teams of entomology students vie for top honors in a college-bowl-like competition.
Gullan and Cranston are noted systematic entomologists; they teach and research insect identification, distribution, evolution and ecology.
Writer Abigail Tucker of the Smithsonian described the Gullan-Cranston book as "classic" in her article, "Bugs, Brains and Trivia," about the Linnaean Games:
"To prepare, teams from universities across the country practice weekly, poring over classic texts like P.J. Gullan and P.S. Cranston’s The Insects, memorizing banks of recorded questions from previous games and reading journals to keep up to date with the latest in pesticide chemistry. They bone up on social entomology, medical entomology, ecology and the dreaded systematics, which includes insect phylogeny and evolution. They also work on speed and reflexes, slapping at the buzzer like they’d swat a vicious mosquito."