CULTURE TECHNIQUES FOR ACANTHOPS FALCATA, 
A NEOTROPICAL MANTID SUITABLE FOR 
BIOLOGICAL STUDIES 
(WITH NOTES ON RAISING WEB BUILDING SPIDERS)* 
By Michael H. Robinson and Barbara Robinson 
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, P.O. Box 2072, Balboa, 
Canal Zone (Panama). 
Introduction 
“It is both expensive and difficult to maintain a year-round 
colony of mantids and a continuous supply of living insects upon 
which to feed them. Because of their cannibalism, mantids must be 
raised in individual containers, and the smaller males are invariably 
in short supply.” Roeder, 1963, p. 141. 
We think that we have found the solutions to these problems. We 
have devised a simple and inexpensive culture regime and found a 
species that is easy to manage in captivity. This species, Acanthops 
falcata Stol, is small enough to raise in large numbers in a modest 
amount of space and large enough to be convenient for a wide 
number of biological investigations. Females that are sexually 
receptive can be triggered to mate by a dark/ light transition and 
males also become sexually active following such a transition. 
Matings are thus readily manipulate by the experimenter. In 
addition, the species is fecund and hardy. 
Our interest in solving the problems of raising predatory arthro- 
pods began in 1971, when we needed naive predators in order to 
investigate instinctive behavior. We used two species of araneid 
spiders, Argiope argentata and A. aemula, feeding them on dead 
drosophiloid flies (Robinson & Robinson, 1976a). Since then we 
have raised several generations of A. argentata and successfully 
hand reared two other species of web building spiders from egg 
cocoons, without the restriction of using dead prey, which makes 
the problem simpler. 
* Manuscript received by the editor September 8, 1978. 
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