At the end of last summer, I had the pleasure of taking a female praying mantis into my home. She was being harassed by a group of children at the entrance to the local Bi-Lo grocery store, and I scooped her up, drove her home, and deposited her into a well equipped 10 gallon aquarium. She seemed to delight in a daily diet of crickets intended for anglers. Once settled into her new environs, she began the process of laying six frothy egg cases on the aquarium's screen top at three week intervals. By the third time she suffered through the throes of labor, the first eggs began to hatch--providing her with hundreds of tasty morsels to aid her recovery. Unable to appreciate the marvelous symmetry of nature, I rescued dozens of baby mantises, acquired a tube of vestigial fruit flies from Furman's biology department, and became a foster parent. On a sad day just after Christmas, the babies' true mother ended her all too short life-cycle. Of the six hatchings (producing hundreds if not thousands of baby bugs), twelve small mantids (growing larger by the day) have survived the Darwinian struggle and live in large jars on a steady diet of fruit flies...and now small insects from my yard that I catch in a dime store butterfly net. (An activity that I needed to explain to my bemused neighbors.)

I initially discovered only a few mantid related resources on the Web and had to learn to raise my insectoid brethren as I went. I also found that the insect-related reference materials at Barnes & Nobles--Greenville's most valuable cultural resource--offered sketchy and conflicting information about my green buddies.

So I set out to use part of my little corner of the Web to gather information about mantids--especially how to care for them as pets. If you have any personal or expert knowledge about these beautiful creatures, please pass it along.

Mantis lovers of the world unite!