CARNIVOROUS INSECTS 175 



(Idolium diabolicum) from Mozambique the body and 

 walking legs are green, and harmonise with the surrounding 

 foliage, while only the underside of the prothorax and 

 raptorial limbs have a flower-like colouring of purple and 

 white. Moreover, these parts are abnormally flattened 

 and extended ; so that what we may call the " business 

 end " of the insect becomes a veritable trap, baited with 

 diabolical ingenuity. Allured by what they take to be a 

 nectar-distilling flower, butterflies and bees fly right into 

 the clutches of the terrible raptorial limbs. 



Another flower-mimicking mantid is Gongylus gongy- 

 loides, from Southern India, an insect which has been 

 known to naturalists for upwards of three centuries, but 

 of whose strange habits nothing was discovered until 

 comparatively recent years. The species is thus described 

 from living examples by Dr. J. Anderson : " On looking 

 at the insects from above they did not exhibit any very 

 striking features beyond the leaf-like expansion of the 

 prothorax and the foliaceous appendages of the limbs, both 

 of which, like the upper surface of the insect, are coloured 

 green, but on turning to the under surface the aspect is 

 entirely different. The leaf -like expansion of the pro- 

 thorax, instead of being green, is a clear, pale lavender- 

 violet, with a faint pink bloom along the edges of the 

 leaf, so that this position of the insect has the exact 

 appearance of the corolla of a plant, a floral simulation 

 which is perfected by the presence of a dark, blackish- 

 brown spot in the centre, over the prothorax, which mimics 

 the opening to the tube of a corolla. A favourite position 

 of this insect is to hang head downwards among a mass of 

 green foliage, and, when it does so, it generally remains 

 almost motionless, but at intervals evinces a swaying 

 movement as of a flower touched by a gentle breeze ; and 

 while in this attitude, with its fore-limbs banded violet 



