I noticed that while many mantises sat very still waiting for prey, some of the leaf-mimicking mantises also imitated how the leaf would move if hanging from a twig. That's pretty amazing!
Praying mantises are awesome! I need to write and create a science and nature reference book all about them and grasshoppers though the AMNH already pretty much did so with Innumerable Insects.
As an evolutionary biologist and bioinformatician, I love Lohit's take on the importance of capturing the behavioral data in addition to the genomic data. As easy as it is to get (relatively speaking), genomics do not always tell us about the most important, complicated, and/or fascinating things about a given organism. Keep up the great work!
I've raised about 10 different species. Adding a small air current, even just blowing breath on them, made the mantids more willing to strike prey as it allowed them to mimic the movement of a swaying object and hide their strike and/or movement toward the prey.
I've got so much information on bugs packed ibto my brain that it's rare when i learn something new; this video taught me 2 brand new things! 1, some mantids actually guard their eggs and young, and 2, some species engage in 'mating dances'. That's absolutley incredible, I had no clue they could be so behaviorally complex! thanks for making such an awesome episode!!
As a long-time mantis enthusiast, I can say that they pretty much start eating immediately, and often start eating their prey from the head or neck while it is still alive
Insect mouth parts are deceptive. Interesting to watch too. And how they turn to watch you. Uncanny valley until you get used to it. I found some egg cases and set them out in a sheltered spot. The tiny ones are cute and really tuck into the early pests like aphids.
That was fun. I was a little ticked when it was obviously the end and you hadn't talked about the assassination of the mate... thought for a split second that you were leaving it out. But ultimately you did not disappoint! Thank you!
Two more fun facts about praying mantises: The females are bigger than the males and they can eat the males after they mate with them. Male mantises have wings and can fly! Just like grasshoppers and locusts!
This is an excellent video! Mantises have always been fascinating to me. Once I found out how diverse they are and that there are so many different species, I liked them more and more!
@@neutrongarbage With almost 360° vision, they are seeing you, and they may well be capable of watching you and their prey simultaneously. The creepy impression that they do so arises from the dark spot directed towards the observer being interpreted as a pupil, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudopupil
I'm from the Ms Gulf Coast and all I ever see here is the green mantis, so it's really fascinating to me how varied their forms and shapes. So cool. I've always liked mantises! Neat video
I caught a mantis when I was a kid and watched it while we fed it all kinds of bugs. These things are bad ass eating machines. It didn't care that two weird kids were staring at it the whole time but it didn't waste any time grabbing and eating everything we put in the bug bottle.
I love these critters, they are so wonderfully weird!! I've watched them since I was a little one, too. We have a fair number of them living in our area, largely all one species. It's pretty cool, though, because predatory insects tend to be affected more by insecticides and herbicides due to the concentration effect. Having them and assassin bugs live in our yard means we have a relatively healthy ecosystem in our area, and a fair bit of biodiversity. We are happy to encourage this!!!
Been my favorite insect on earth since I was a kid; they used to hop into my bedroom window and sit in front of the ant farm glass like they were watching a movie, after a few hours they would turn and hop back out the window as I was going to sleep. They did this throughout my childhood so I've always been curious if they somehow communicate locations to each other like ants, because there were dozens over the years that did that same thing.
I did actually know that there were many different species of mantises aside from the classic praying mantis: Including the leaf insect, a close relative, the stick insect and many mantises that camouflage. I wonder why the Insectarium at the AMNH has no praying mantises? (But it does have leaf insects and stick insects.)
Once when I was moving house with my partner and kids to a new place maybe 150 miles away, a mantis decided to make the move with us. She perched on the spare tire on the back of the vehicle and could have gotten off at several points when we were at a stop within easy reach of vegetation, but she stayed the whole way. The loyal mantis.
There's a theory that small insects did not evolve to sense pain since their lives are so short and they usually reproduce so prolifically that it would serve no purpose. I hope that's true for all these prey targets that start getting eaten alive face-first lol.
Heard this too. It makes sense due the brain capacity and neuron investment needed would be fairly expensive and the pain response would be detrimental to survival at this scale.
@@schweepy_g It wouldn't require that much brain capacity, but I guess if your life is in the timescale of months to even days, it would be a complete waste of energy to develop dedicated nociceptors, but a couple here and there could potentially be useful. Also notable is that a lot of creatures still seem to try to avoid noxious stimuli or exhibit some kind of "panic" response. You make an interesting point about the usefulness of pain relative to scale (and the attenuation of the sensation of pain). A pain response might still be useful, but perhaps not one that can be as debilitating as it can be for humans. I suspect the social nature of our species also makes it so that debilitating pain does not guarantee death as a friend or family member may come along and rescue us.
One of the coolest things I witnessed as a child was a female mantis eating her mate. It was cool because I had never witnessed anything like it before and she ate almost every single piece of the male. There was only like a small bit of wing and a piece of leg left. After she was done, we relocated her to our covered deck which had the southern wall covered in vegetation. She laid her egg case there and we later got to witness her young hatch from it. It was amazing.
I just visited the AMNH on a daytrip with my family just yesterday! When I visited the Insectarium and Butterfly Vivarium in the Glider Center and saw the silkworms and silk cocoons/pupas, hornworms, leaf-cutter ant colonies, leaf insects, stick insects and all the live butterflies and moths and chrysalises (No caterpillars they are breed on farms and sent in chrysalis stages to the museum’s butterfly vivarium.), and I noticed something strange, I didn’t notice any adult hawkmoths or domestic silk moths that were the full metaphorized silkworms and hornworms from their pupas and silk cocoons from the Insectarium, what does the museum do with the silkworms and hornworms after they become pupas and silk cocoons and later emerge as the adult moths?
Can you make videos about the evolution of each sense? Especially hearing and analogous mechanisms for hearing would be very interesting! (maybe better for PBS Eons)
Mantises and Mantis Shrimp are the most amazing groups of arthropods. Both groups are amazingly inquisitive compared to all other arthropods, giving the appearance at least of greater intelligence. *edited, I almost forget Jumping Spiders...another favorite.
I have a question!! So I always notice this the MOST with mantises, but I'm thinking it happens in some other kinds of insects too... but what is UP with the little black spots on the eyes? Are those pupils, somehow??? Is that actually an indication of where the insect's focus is, or does it have some other function? I know they have compound eyes - they don't blink and they don't have eyeballs that move like we humans do, or even like owls. So it makes me super curious how that spot relates to the way they look at the world!
It's called a psuedopupil. It's not a pupil like ours though. Because their eyes are still compound they have thousands of tiny individual lenses. It just so happens that when you look at them, some of their lenses are dead center to you, so you look down through the eye to the inside of their heads. It gives the illusion of a pupil, but isn't really one.
@@Stothehighest Ohhhhh that is awesome, vaguely creepy, and fascinating all at the same time. Talk about the abyss staring back, hahaha! The inside of their heads?! Delighted and disturbed at the same time hehe
Every spring my wife and I buy mantis eggs. Once they start to hatch we release them into our front and back yard. It's been nice, they hunt insects and I've seen some HUGE mantids because of it!
Many years ago I found a small mantid that looked exactly like a wasp. It was the same size and had the same colors. It was the cutest thing... It seemed to be looking at me while I had it on my hand, and was almost waving it's front legs at me as if wanting to hit the boxing ring. What a cutie. I let it go... A darling creature.
Mantises are the scariest insect. Like, a giant ant would be scary. A giant wasp would be very scary. But a human sized mantis? I think I might just die on the spot out of fear.
I had a baby Preying Mantis on the back of my truck last yr at work, shocked me as they are rarely seen here anymore, and a baby non the less, and then 3 weeks later I see one on my door all brown looking, prob same one but had more food, don't know if it was the same one.
Have you ever seen a homicidal Stick? Yes of course I have read Daredevil. Also love the Marvel Netflix show, now TBC and available on Disney+, thank you very much. Frank Miller did great.
Many insects devolved their number of wings to 2 or 0 on multiple occasions, but the closest we got for devolving the number of legs are mantises. With 4(6). Why is 6 legs so impossible to reduce? Vertebrates reduced 4 to 2 or 0 on countless occasions.
Hey evolutionary biologists, im curious as to how something could evolve to appear as something in their surroundings...how do genes know to express into something that mimics the external world?? How would genes "know" or be able to "see" the colors and shapes of a flower and translate that into gene expression??
My favorite ecomorphs are giant marine filter feeders descended from apex predators. I mean, one of the very first super predators, the anomalocaris, have filter feeding offshoots and modern sharks and whales even more so have their giant filter feeders. Heck, there's even evidence of crocodilians with adaptations that would favor filtration feeding.
My favorite bug. as of Korea 1983. On a force march through the mountains i found 2 bugs, a 5 inch spider and a little brown mantis no bigger than my thumb. I dropped the spider in front of the mantis, who was occupied with a cricket I'd fed it. The little mantis took the spider in one arm while still holding the half eaten cricket, ripped three legs off the spider and sent it spinning in the air like a frisbee. Though all bugs make me buggy real fast my favs are mantis, spider and dragonfly. 🕸 The male mantis will execute a display to be recognized as a mate, not a meal.... until it is.
I remember once I was a little kid, and I saw a mantis at the playground. I ended up putting it on a tree so no one killed it in the playground.... Not the last time I rescued a mantis, I ended up saving another one a few years ago this time from a spider.
So, when I first read the title of this video, I thought it said "How Manatees Became Nature's Strongest Assassins." I have to say that I'm disappointed that this video isn't about vicious, killer sea cows. 🤣🤣🤣
They keep calling the forelimbs "legs", but are they really legs anymore? They seem to be fully-functional arms. Furthermore, mantises appear to be quadrupedal.
Resemblence to chameleon both resemble same camouflage, vision , wating and hunting strategy , hunting body part move like springs , also waking like ping pong motion its like too good
I noticed that while many mantises sat very still waiting for prey, some of the leaf-mimicking mantises also imitated how the leaf would move if hanging from a twig. That's pretty amazing!
You should try smelling the orchid mantids
@@tomarmadiyer2698That sounds like something an orchid mantis would say to convince someone to bring their face within striking range.
Yeah they do that swaying/trembling thing
Praying mantises are awesome! I need to write and create a science and nature reference book all about them and grasshoppers though the AMNH already pretty much did so with Innumerable Insects.
As an evolutionary biologist and bioinformatician, I love Lohit's take on the importance of capturing the behavioral data in addition to the genomic data. As easy as it is to get (relatively speaking), genomics do not always tell us about the most important, complicated, and/or fascinating things about a given organism. Keep up the great work!
I've raised about 10 different species. Adding a small air current, even just blowing breath on them, made the mantids more willing to strike prey as it allowed them to mimic the movement of a swaying object and hide their strike and/or movement toward the prey.
So cool to see Lohit on this vid after hearing his interview on Ologies. Keep up the great work Lohit!
Just came to say that! I was so excited!
First time seeing him, and I wanted to hear more of him!
I've got so much information on bugs packed ibto my brain that it's rare when i learn something new; this video taught me 2 brand new things!
1, some mantids actually guard their eggs and young, and 2, some species engage in 'mating dances'.
That's absolutley incredible, I had no clue they could be so behaviorally complex! thanks for making such an awesome episode!!
I get the impression that Mantis prey tends to not yet be dead when the Mantis starts eating.
Thats because the prey isn’t dead
They like their food fresh
As a long-time mantis enthusiast, I can say that they pretty much start eating immediately, and often start eating their prey from the head or neck while it is still alive
Oysters come to mind.
Insect mouth parts are deceptive. Interesting to watch too.
And how they turn to watch you. Uncanny valley until you get used to it.
I found some egg cases and set them out in a sheltered spot. The tiny ones are cute and really tuck into the early pests like aphids.
i can see spending a lifetime studying these mantis friends. fascinating! great video.
Was not expecting a Wayne Gretzky quote in a Mantis documentary. Not that I'm complaining! :D
That was fun. I was a little ticked when it was obviously the end and you hadn't talked about the assassination of the mate... thought for a split second that you were leaving it out. But ultimately you did not disappoint! Thank you!
Two more fun facts about praying mantises:
The females are bigger than the males and they can eat the males after they mate with them.
Male mantises have wings and can fly! Just like grasshoppers and locusts!
This is an excellent video! Mantises have always been fascinating to me. Once I found out how diverse they are and that there are so many different species, I liked them more and more!
I used to keep them as pets when I was a kid. You can see them watch you and their prey.
"if that human was only smaller, I'd eat him too" - Mantis
I worked on a farm which had them en masse... Thousands every year. They really do watch you, it's kind of creepy.
@@neutrongarbage With almost 360° vision, they are seeing you, and they may well be capable of watching you and their prey simultaneously. The creepy impression that they do so arises from the dark spot directed towards the observer being interpreted as a pupil, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudopupil
Do they judge you?
@@Mr.Anders0n_ I would imagine they judge that I am too big to eat :)
Man said a homicidal stick 😂
Man said a 😂
Man said 😂
Man 😂
😂
I'm from the Ms Gulf Coast and all I ever see here is the green mantis, so it's really fascinating to me how varied their forms and shapes. So cool. I've always liked mantises! Neat video
I caught a mantis when I was a kid and watched it while we fed it all kinds of bugs. These things are bad ass eating machines. It didn't care that two weird kids were staring at it the whole time but it didn't waste any time grabbing and eating everything we put in the bug bottle.
Wow, mantises are sooooooo cool!
Big fan of Dr. Ware. Hope to see more. Thanks!
I love these critters, they are so wonderfully weird!! I've watched them since I was a little one, too. We have a fair number of them living in our area, largely all one species. It's pretty cool, though, because predatory insects tend to be affected more by insecticides and herbicides due to the concentration effect. Having them and assassin bugs live in our yard means we have a relatively healthy ecosystem in our area, and a fair bit of biodiversity. We are happy to encourage this!!!
Been my favorite insect on earth since I was a kid; they used to hop into my bedroom window and sit in front of the ant farm glass like they were watching a movie, after a few hours they would turn and hop back out the window as I was going to sleep. They did this throughout my childhood so I've always been curious if they somehow communicate locations to each other like ants, because there were dozens over the years that did that same thing.
Mantises and Dragonflies are both so amazing!
Human: Mr. Mantis, would you rather meet a female or a chameleon in the woods?
Male Mantis: 🥵
Dr. Jessica's enthusiasm is infectious. Btw, I loved the video
The prey items don't see them coming. This is fascinating!
More teachers like the curator, please
Nature never ceases to amaze. We are really doing a disservice to future generations by not doing more to protect species from extinction.
I did actually know that there were many different species of mantises aside from the classic praying mantis: Including the leaf insect, a close relative, the stick insect and many mantises that camouflage. I wonder why the Insectarium at the AMNH has no praying mantises? (But it does have leaf insects and stick insects.)
Poking the algo! Love these little Earthlings.
Jessica Ware is my hero.
Once when I was moving house with my partner and kids to a new place maybe 150 miles away, a mantis decided to make the move with us. She perched on the spare tire on the back of the vehicle and could have gotten off at several points when we were at a stop within easy reach of vegetation, but she stayed the whole way. The loyal mantis.
iridescent bark mantis is my fave - very unmantis like in appearance and behaviour, but just beautiful to look at.
They are so awesome and I didn’t know there were so many different kinds 😮
I absolutely love this channel
The best Thumbnail of recent times.
9:00 Those nest skills are impresive!
One of my fav nonhumans. I have mantis brooches as well.🖤
There's a theory that small insects did not evolve to sense pain since their lives are so short and they usually reproduce so prolifically that it would serve no purpose. I hope that's true for all these prey targets that start getting eaten alive face-first lol.
Heard this too. It makes sense due the brain capacity and neuron investment needed would be fairly expensive and the pain response would be detrimental to survival at this scale.
@@schweepy_g It wouldn't require that much brain capacity, but I guess if your life is in the timescale of months to even days, it would be a complete waste of energy to develop dedicated nociceptors, but a couple here and there could potentially be useful. Also notable is that a lot of creatures still seem to try to avoid noxious stimuli or exhibit some kind of "panic" response.
You make an interesting point about the usefulness of pain relative to scale (and the attenuation of the sensation of pain). A pain response might still be useful, but perhaps not one that can be as debilitating as it can be for humans. I suspect the social nature of our species also makes it so that debilitating pain does not guarantee death as a friend or family member may come along and rescue us.
Actually, studies show that insects feel pain and even have emotions
@@Carlos-bz5oo would love to read about this. any authors/papers you know of?
This isn’t true at all. Drosophila nociception, for instance, in both adults and larvae, is used as an assay in many experiments
Mantis are so cool, thanks for the vid!
I saw a thistle-leaf-mimic mantis when I was in Spain years ago. Perfect colouring for the local thistles and very spiky.
Let's go Towson!
Mantises are so cool I love them 😍
This place is so cool and the people seem so nice
One of the coolest things I witnessed as a child was a female mantis eating her mate. It was cool because I had never witnessed anything like it before and she ate almost every single piece of the male. There was only like a small bit of wing and a piece of leg left. After she was done, we relocated her to our covered deck which had the southern wall covered in vegetation. She laid her egg case there and we later got to witness her young hatch from it. It was amazing.
im surprised no one has made a mantis fighting game.
I like the mantis brooch, very fashionable accessory for a professional entomologist :-)
Lol, "sack with legs" sounds like a rather versatile insult
Cockroaches are related to mantises, and you can tell mantises are just hyper violent cockroaches, very cool!
Not me cheering for the Ghost Mantis because I own one and I adore him! He is a fascinating little guy- I love watching him hunt.
I just visited the AMNH on a daytrip with my family just yesterday! When I visited the Insectarium and Butterfly Vivarium in the Glider Center and saw the silkworms and silk cocoons/pupas, hornworms, leaf-cutter ant colonies, leaf insects, stick insects and all the live butterflies and moths and chrysalises (No caterpillars they are breed on farms and sent in chrysalis stages to the museum’s butterfly vivarium.), and I noticed something strange, I didn’t notice any adult hawkmoths or domestic silk moths that were the full metaphorized silkworms and hornworms from their pupas and silk cocoons from the Insectarium, what does the museum do with the silkworms and hornworms after they become pupas and silk cocoons and later emerge as the adult moths?
Ooh im actively interested in praying mantises now, thank you!
Super cool video!
Can you make videos about the evolution of each sense? Especially hearing and analogous mechanisms for hearing would be very interesting! (maybe better for PBS Eons)
Mantises and Mantis Shrimp are the most amazing groups of arthropods. Both groups are amazingly inquisitive compared to all other arthropods, giving the appearance at least of greater intelligence. *edited, I almost forget Jumping Spiders...another favorite.
amazing video
Okayy Lohit! 👏🏿
That hummingbird vs mantis clip was insane
Awesome!! Thanks!!
Another one of my favorites is this one spider that doesnt make a web but its an ambush spider that changes its color where ever it is living on
Mantids are my favorite insects!
If you've never handled a mantid, katydid or phasmid, do so! Truly fascinating animals!! 🥰
Before I pick up any mantid, I always ask permission.
I want video about australia please ❤❤❤❤
I love the broach!
I have a question!! So I always notice this the MOST with mantises, but I'm thinking it happens in some other kinds of insects too... but what is UP with the little black spots on the eyes? Are those pupils, somehow??? Is that actually an indication of where the insect's focus is, or does it have some other function? I know they have compound eyes - they don't blink and they don't have eyeballs that move like we humans do, or even like owls. So it makes me super curious how that spot relates to the way they look at the world!
It's called a psuedopupil. It's not a pupil like ours though. Because their eyes are still compound they have thousands of tiny individual lenses. It just so happens that when you look at them, some of their lenses are dead center to you, so you look down through the eye to the inside of their heads. It gives the illusion of a pupil, but isn't really one.
@@StothehighestThat is friggin’ bizarre!
@@Stothehighest Ohhhhh that is awesome, vaguely creepy, and fascinating all at the same time. Talk about the abyss staring back, hahaha! The inside of their heads?! Delighted and disturbed at the same time hehe
Stereo vision is what the cameraman trying to put two humans of widely different heights in the same frame wishes he had.
Every spring my wife and I buy mantis eggs. Once they start to hatch we release them into our front and back yard. It's been nice, they hunt insects and I've seen some HUGE mantids because of it!
You sound so much like Maya Rudolph, I love it!
I am simping on the entomologist
I truly believe that mantises are sentient!
jLKFDjSLK:DfjDS:LKJF Lohit??? Definitely a well-known guy in the mantis hobby. I didn't expect to see him in this though!
Mantises are great
Many years ago I found a small mantid that looked exactly like a wasp. It was the same size and had the same colors. It was the cutest thing... It seemed to be looking at me while I had it on my hand, and was almost waving it's front legs at me as if wanting to hit the boxing ring. What a cutie. I let it go... A darling creature.
The fact that mantis evolved from predatory roaches are fascinating
This some real life pokemon type of stuff! 😃
Mantises are the scariest insect. Like, a giant ant would be scary. A giant wasp would be very scary. But a human sized mantis? I think I might just die on the spot out of fear.
I had a baby Preying Mantis on the back of my truck last yr at work, shocked me as they are rarely seen here anymore, and a baby non the less, and then 3 weeks later I see one on my door all brown looking, prob same one but had more food, don't know if it was the same one.
Have you ever seen a homicidal Stick?
Yes of course I have read Daredevil. Also love the Marvel Netflix show, now TBC and available on Disney+, thank you very much. Frank Miller did great.
"'You miss 100 of the shots you don't take.' Wayne Gretzky"
- Michael Scott
Many insects devolved their number of wings to 2 or 0 on multiple occasions, but the closest we got for devolving the number of legs are mantises. With 4(6). Why is 6 legs so impossible to reduce?
Vertebrates reduced 4 to 2 or 0 on countless occasions.
Easiest pet I ever had. These dude eat once a day and just chill in place when they are fed
Can you make a video about assassin bugs?
Hey evolutionary biologists, im curious as to how something could evolve to appear as something in their surroundings...how do genes know to express into something that mimics the external world?? How would genes "know" or be able to "see" the colors and shapes of a flower and translate that into gene expression??
Is the thumbnail a reference to Killing Me Softly by the Fugees? Timely!
Anyone who hasn't seen the Ze Frank True Facts episode about mantises should definitely go watch it after this.
My favorite ecomorphs are giant marine filter feeders descended from apex predators. I mean, one of the very first super predators, the anomalocaris, have filter feeding offshoots and modern sharks and whales even more so have their giant filter feeders. Heck, there's even evidence of crocodilians with adaptations that would favor filtration feeding.
Zorak from Space Ghost is my favorite cartoon mantis...
My favorite bug. as of Korea 1983. On a force march through the mountains i found 2 bugs, a 5 inch spider and a little brown mantis no bigger than my thumb. I dropped the spider in front of the mantis, who was occupied with a cricket I'd fed it. The little mantis took the spider in one arm while still holding the half eaten cricket, ripped three legs off the spider and sent it spinning in the air like a frisbee. Though all bugs make me buggy real fast my favs are mantis, spider and dragonfly. 🕸
The male mantis will execute a display to be recognized as a mate, not a meal.... until it is.
I remember once I was a little kid, and I saw a mantis at the playground. I ended up putting it on a tree so no one killed it in the playground....
Not the last time I rescued a mantis, I ended up saving another one a few years ago this time from a spider.
Love Mantises. Alien looking and cool
I was always scared of Mantis’ due to the fact they eat birds. Thought they could grab a good hold of my hand and eat me 😅
Wow, lots of convergent evolution there I think.
Pro level net technique.
The mantis killing the hummingbird video is horrifying.
I love mantises.
Mantis shrimp vs preying mantis, who'd win?
You didn't discuss flying. Can all of them fly?
Not all species can fly. The one from my profile picture doesn't grow wings in adulthood.
No,most species only males can fly,as females spend most of their adult lives pregnant.
No, not all like Ceej said. Also, females of flighted species tend not to fly much, if at all, but some females can fly decently.
Praying mantises are badass , they do not use salt or pepper , they just go for it
So the mantis can recognize by sight their raptorial legs so they won't accidentally bite them while eating their prey?
So, when I first read the title of this video, I thought it said "How Manatees Became Nature's Strongest Assassins." I have to say that I'm disappointed that this video isn't about vicious, killer sea cows. 🤣🤣🤣
I think mantises are cute little creatures.
another reminder that if insects were much larger or if i were much smaller then i would be food
They keep calling the forelimbs "legs", but are they really legs anymore? They seem to be fully-functional arms. Furthermore, mantises appear to be quadrupedal.
They can and do use them for walking, but I see your point.
yes, they have feet on the ends still
Resemblence to chameleon both resemble same camouflage, vision , wating and hunting strategy , hunting body part move like springs , also waking like ping pong motion its like too good
Fun fact about mantises. They're smiling if you don't zoom in too closely.