878 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XX. 



No. XXXVI.— THE FOOD OF A MANTIS. 



The other evening my attention was drawn to a mantis on the wall of 

 my tent which had caught a cricket. The capture had only just been 

 effected ; but the cricket, to my surprise, was apparently already dead and 

 must, I suppose, have been killed by a single bite. The mantis held the 

 body of its prey firmly clasped between its fore-legs and proceeded to cut 

 through the neck and decapitate the cricket. This achieved it com- 

 menced its meal upon the severed head. It struck me as a feat in itself, 

 the way the jaws combined the two functions of devouring and of retaining 

 the head without ever letting it drop. When the whole of the head had 

 disappeared, the mantis began on the thorax, but had made little progress 

 before my attention was unfortunately diverted. After an interval of 

 between ten and fifteen minutes I came back. The mantis was in the same 

 place, but the whole of the cricket had disappeared, with the exception of 

 the extreme tip of the abdomen with its pair of caudal appendages which 

 projecting from between the jaws of the mantis and was speedily demo- 

 lished. There were two fragments of legs on the table against the wall 

 below where the mantis was resting, but no sign of any other fragments, 

 so that appearances unquestionably pointed to the mantis having steadily 

 eaten through that cricket from head to tail and disposed of the whole. 

 I much regret having been unable to verify this but have no doubt that it 

 did occur. But the performance seems a remarkable one in view of the com- 

 parative bulk of the two insects. The mantis, it is true, was about 3 inches 

 in length, but a slender species, brownish-grey in colour ; while the cricket 

 at least J inch long, was more than twice as thick in body. It must be 

 remembered too what a considerable portion of the mantis' 3 inches of 

 lengths is taken up by its long neck. A mantis of the same species which 

 I captured with a view to sending to the Society for identification 

 unfortunately came to grief, but the species is a common one. 



It was its stowage capacity, without any obvious tightening of the waist- 

 belt, that especially interested me in this mantis, rather than the size of 

 its prey, for these insects will sometimes successfully attack surprisingly 

 large creatures. Three years ago in the Aden Hinterland I came across a 

 large green mantis on a cornstalk, and securely grasped between its legs a 

 large green grasshopper of locust of about the same size as Acridium 

 peregrinum. Here again the mantis had commenced on the head of 

 which it had devoured about one-third, but the unfortunate locust was still 

 alive and capable of some movement — and yet some people say there is no 

 cruelty in nature. In this instance, but for the evidence of my own eye- 

 sight, I should certainly have considered the locust too powerful an insect 

 for any mantis to tackle with success. 



That the love passages of certain spiders have at times a tragic ending 



