My father keeps praying mantises, four of them. I’m not sure why; they’re hardly the most affectionate of creatures, but at least they’re pretty cool as a sort of curiosity pet. Since he’s in Scotland this week, yanking innocent fish out of their murky-cold homes, I’m charged with looking after the little creatures.

In order to survive they need a meal about once every two days. A live meal. So every couple of days I have to grab a jam-jar and piece of cardboard and see if I can catch a fly or a moth or something. Actually getting the insect I catch into the cage with the mantises is something of a chore, as you can imagine, since both insects are continually trying to escape.

So I caught this housefly earlier (I assume it was a housefly because it was a fly and it was in my house) and spent a good twenty minutes trying to coax it to its death. Eventually I got it in and the Mantis caught it, just look in a David Attenborough documentary brought to life.

I decided to watch the Mantis eat its meal, a little macabre perhaps, but interesting nonetheless. Two things struck me about this spectacle:

Firstly, flies stay alive for a long time when being eaten. I know the mantis doesn’t have a poisonous bite or sting like a lot of predatory insects do, but I still assumed it would kill its prey quickly with a bite to the neck to make eating it easier, like lions do. But no, the mantis started on the side of the fly, just working its way into it. And the fly just kept on waving its legs, flapping its one free wing. It’s really quite grim to see something that’s almost half-eaten still alive.

But not as grim as the second thing that struck me about watching this: as the mantis bit away at the side of the fly, these little white maggoty worms started falling out of the fly and wriggling around on the floor. At first I wondered if these were the fly’s offspring, but flies lay eggs. And these things were really quite repulsive, each about 2mm long, writhing around on the bottom of the cage. One of them got onto the mantis as well, and wriggled over its eye. I would not have eaten that fly if I was a mantis, I’d have just thrown it down the second anything like that came out of it.

So what were these wormy things? Well, I can only assume that they were some sort of parasite. I had a look on Yahoo! answers and found this, which seems to be something similar. Really, how nasty is that, to be full of chunky parasites and not being able to do anything about it except carry on as normal? Ugh. Just thought I’d share that with you all.

Tags: David Attenborough, eaten alive, feed, housefly, insects, macabre, parasites, praying mantis, worms

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.