Our mantis experiment seems to have failed. We had maybe a hundred baby mantises for a few days after they hatched, then I let most of them go. I left about six of them in the cage, figuring that even if some died, we’d at least have one survivor. Well, only a couple days after that, it appeared that all of the mantises were dead. I had been adding fruit flies to the cage and there were still plenty of fruit flies running around in there. It didn’t look like they were being eaten. There were some mantis bodies that appeared obviously dead and a couple that might have just been standing still, but now it’s been a few days and they are still in the same places. I must say that I’m a bit disappointed. Maybe we should have kept all the mantis babies in there. Even if most of them ate each other, hopefully we would have had at least one live and grow larger. I also feel bummed that I put the effort into taking care of the fruit flies for two months, only to have no more living mantises a week after the egg case finally hatched. I’m considering whether or not it’s worth buying another egg case and trying again. We already have the fruit flies, so we wouldn’t have to buy those. I haven’t decided yet.
Failure of the mantis experiment
April 10, 2009 by burckeri
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged fruit flies, praying mantises | 1 Comment
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I'm Erin, a Catholic homeschooling mom who tries hard and fails every day. I'm the wife of Don and mother of four kids: 18-year-old Peter, 16-year-old Amina (adopted from Ukraine in 2018), 11-year-old Simon, and 7-year-old Clara. Click on the picture for more about me.
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[…] more about my experiment here. Then read what the good old blog finder found for me…another failed mantis experiment. She is just as insane as I am, only she grew her own fruit fly […]