Praying Mantis Life Cycle

Video Transcript

"I'm Mike Quinn, I've been an entomologist for twenty years, and we're here at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas, talking about the praying mantis life cycle. The, one of the more well-known aspects which is true is that the female can, on occasion, she'll eat the male when they meet, mate, or typically after they mate, and that happens typically when the female is undernourished, and so the male provides food for the female and so helps provide food for the developing egg case, which is called an ootheca. And she'll lay one or more of these egg masses that comes out as kind of foam, and then it hardens up. And then later, a hundred or more small praying mantises come out of that and they, if they don't have enough food, they'll actually feed on each other, but typically they spread out in the environment and they help eat other, a wide variety of insects, and then they mature and mate and reproduce, and that's the praying mantis life cycle."