Pet Mantis Care Sheet Video #mantiscare #mantiscaresheet

Hi, I'm Peter Claussen from Bugs and Cyberspace. I have had my website for 24 years. Bugs in cyberspace.com and I have also had a

care

sheet

there for many years. I would like to make a

video

. today on how to

care

for mantids to help back up that very old care

sheet

, it's now complete, it has a lot of good information, it's definitely worth a read and I've been directing my clients there for a long time, but it's missing a bit of information . demonstrating the same way through text that

video

s or images can, so we will simply cover the various topics found in the care sheet in video form here, so let's get started when you receive a pet

mantis

from my part will normally be a young nymph, because we sell young nymphs they have a lot of life expectancy left as

mantis

es tend to only live about a year which is a deterrent for many pet owners because they want something May it be with them for a long time.

I want to have a serious relationship with your pets. It seems like I've always argued and maybe because I've had so many bugs for so long that it's actually wonderful to see the entire life cycle of your pet from almost beginning to end. and being able to experience that in a shorter time frame relative to our life span, so after a year, when you've enjoyed your relationship with your pet, you can get a new one and experience one of the other millions of species. of animals on the planet, so when you get your mantis you will want to move it to something bigger.

This is a sperka stern twig mantis. I don't know if you can see it very well. There is a very small mantis. This one here is actually third instar and we're going to talk about the life cycle and growth of mantises a little bit later in this video, so when you get this you're going to want to put it in a larger container and I recommend that. I also sell these on the website, these habitat kit glasses. You can see it's a 32 ounce container like most of you will have seen before in fruit fly cultures and in addition to that, here on the lid, we've glued this little square section here serves as a molting platform , it is a more textured surface and to grow, mantises shed their skin and unlike other arthropods, snakes or other animals that shed their skin during growth, mantises need to hang and are usually completely outdoors. reverse. down or over an angled surface and they hang upside down from that surface and that's how using gravity they come out of their old skin and that textured platform is very important, in addition to this cup that you're looking at, you're going to get a substrate. from us and it's so easy.

I'm going to place the mantis here for a moment. It's as easy as just putting a little bit of this substrate in the base of the cup like this and it doesn't need to be too deep. You can put it. somewhere half an inch three quarters of an inch and it is usually enough for a change of substrate, basically when the mantis droppings or droppings have formed a layer there on the surface of this substrate, you can do it later, at some point, when don't like the shape. It's no longer visible, replace it and there we have the substrate at the bottom.

You can pack it in there a little bit and now you can see that this coconut fiber here we offer two different types of substrates: coconut fiber and sphagnum moss which I like. coconut coir is the best thing you can know when it's drying because it goes from being this dark brown color to a paler light brown color and that's a good indicator that you need to wet it a little more and we'll talk about that a little bit too later because the humidity in the container is very important for your mantis when it is shedding its skin and that is why many people are intimidated by these mantises at first, some species, not so much, they can move very fast and maybe even make small jumps deadly there, although they're no faster than this, so your main concern when handling your young mantises is that they don't fall into maybe a heater vent behind you or, you know, crawl under your refrigerator or something.

So. that, so it's best to open them from their shipping containers, maybe in the middle of your room, near the floor, on the floor mat or whatever, this mantis could fall from about five feet even further than that and Because they are so light-bodied, he could fall completely to the ground and not get hurt, but of course we don't want to take any risks, so it's best to move him to something. I'm on the surface of a table here, close to the ground. in case you drop it and then in an open area where there are no places to hide, although they don't move too fast so you shouldn't have too much trouble so I just pushed it down. the cage I'm very gently directing its movements with my finger there and then another thing that you always have to be very careful with is that you don't close the mantis between the edge of the container here and the lid and so make sure that it's low enough, Push this plant down a little bit and before you push the lid down completely, get a visual image of where your specimen is and then push the lid down with a nice clicking sound like that, so this is really all it takes. that you need for a young mantis habitat and you can see maybe that it moved to the flower there, once it is here in its new home, many people will see that the mantis will stay near the top of the container and that is Son Completely normal, they are ambush predators and therefore rely on their camouflage to blend in with various surfaces in nature.

In the case of this twig mantis, it is mixed with small twigs or sticks. In the case of green mantises, they blend in with the leaves. or green stems and then there are flower mantises that may or may not be mixed with flowers or other types of vegetation. Do you see them working with mantises in this shot? The male right there and the female right behind, with their lobed legs blending in so perfectly with these orchid flowers they will now remain still for much of the time and when passing prey passes by like a fly or in the wild, sometimes for the flower mantis like a bee, even spiders will eat almost any type of insect or arthropod that is smaller than them is fair game, they can be a little picky at times and have learned through evolution that there are some things like maybe hornets, striped things that buzz, maybe these things can sting them or bite them, so they will be very careful and picky in some cases with what they eat but of course as caregivers we want to be careful with what we offer them because we don't want hurting our pets with anything that can sting or bite them.

Now many caregivers will do it. especially during tough times when they may have trouble finding food, take out a bee or a hornet or something and put it in and usually the mantis will be able to dispatch it, but it's better to be safe than sorry and of course I recommend the most Tried and true feeders that are available in the hobby, like a fruit fly culture, same type of container as this one. I sell fruit fly cultures on the website and you can learn more about fruit fly culture care and use at this link. I have another video on them here this is a different size this is the medium size that I sell it has this little pop up lid that makes feeding pretty easy just pop in some fruit flies and I will show you how to feed the mantis a crop of fruit fly, just take this cap off right here, keep an eye on where your mantis is.

This one is moving quite a bit right now because I just put it here, so I'm going to move it down a little bit. Now mantises are fragile, you don't want to accidentally pinch or crush them, but they are actually very manageable and as long as you are careful with them, the young ones especially have a softer body, you can handle them for a long time. Of course, it is best not to stress the animal. Personally, I never hold my mantises unless I'm making videos like this for them and that's partly because I tend to have hundreds of them at a time, so I won't spend as much quality time with each one as I would. my clients will do, but be careful, but don't be afraid of the mantis.

Adult specimens will sometimes nibble you a little, but there you will feel them nibbling on you. away and a little one like this won't nibble you or cause you any harm, you need to worry more about causing them harm by not paying attention to what you're doing, so you know I can get this finger through. to the finger and as I do that, I approach from behind with my thumb here and as you know, by making the presence of my thumb known, you could say right behind it and that presence alone with just the lightest touch will push the mantis out of toe to toe they want to move forward and often offer upwards, which I couldn't fully demonstrate right there, but they will, they will respond to your movements and of course their goal is to come back. to a place where they can feel comfortable just being alone, so I'm going to put it here on this flower over and over again.

The trick is to do it so that the mantis falls off your finger and falls onto the flower or another. surface, so now I'm going to demonstrate how to use this fruit fly culture, fruit flies, this is a relatively new culture, so there aren't thousands of them running around and, actually, for a single mantis, a crop of this size is excessive. I also sell an even smaller crop size than this and it depends on the size of the mantis you are purchasing and different species in the second instar for example can be different sizes so a second instar twig mantis like this is considerably larger and in turn eats larger feeder insects than a second instar ghost mantis, so to demonstrate feeding now I'm going to take advantage of this crop so that all these fruit flies crawling on the side walls or perhaps the lid of this container will be knocked down.

Over and over again, my fruit fly culture video will demonstrate everything you need to know about using fruit fly cultures and how to make them, so that once the flies drop that way and you can look there and see that they are down, they will begin. Going up immediately, you see that one has already gone there, so I'm going to bring it down, so just tap to keep them down, but then you tilt it slightly and they'll get closer and closer to the edge there. edge and you just touch them like this and then before you put this container back because they always want to crawl up, but there may be thousands of them in there and as long as you do this, I don't I don't have to worry about the fruit flies crawling out because they don't they can hold on to the sides and climb while you do this, it's quite easy really and I see I managed to spill one in there, easy way to pick up a fruit fly.

By the way, I'll take it down again there, just put your finger right next to it and like the mantis, it'll want to climb up on it. You just saw him jump there again, so I'll leave this one here. and we'll probably see our mantis hunting for fruit flies here in a while still in a new home, so another trick when you're feeding mantises is that the little insects that they feed will always want to crawl to where the light is. In this case, it happens to be on top of the table, so if I knock them down again, they will naturally start moving in the direction of that light, so after placing the feeders there, figure out where your mantis is in relation to the table. to the light there and then turn the container, so, for example, if the mantis was on the flower here, it would put that flower towards the light instead of away from it because the flies will want to crawl over there and I'll demonstrate it here. for a moment, when you leave this container down here, everyone will start to move to this side of the container because the brightest light in the room here is right here, so you want to put this lid back on that point, being careful not to crush it . the feeders and of course most importantly the mantis and other type of feeder that we use are the house flies and I have some here and usually when I sell the house flies they will be in pupal form.

These are pupi, the plural of pupa is pup. p u p a and p-u-p-a-e these are house fly pubes and are the next step up in terms of feeder size compared to fruit flies, so after your mantis grows a little he will graduate to these larger feeder types, Now you can collect flies from the windows. in your house, as long as your house has not been sprayed with pesticides because you don't want to feed your pet mantis pesticide-laden flies. See one of them crawling towards the light. There I'm going to open this lid again here at At this point, because otherwise we're going to have fruit flies in the house.

I'm going to leave these bloats here again and therefore feeding insects from the outside, many people online will advise against it, but if you browse online, you will be able to discover that it is like changing the news headlines, you will find all the bad things that happen, someone will say that I fed my mantis a wild fly and the next day he wasdead and then it spreads like wildfire and everyone thinks that suddenly that's a bad thing because one person or Now that the Internet has been around for decades, many people have mistakenly attributed some event to some result most of the time, when you feed something external, you are not. you're going to have a problem, is there a chance that you feed your mantis a grasshopper that was parasitized with a mane worm and then the mantis in turn acquires a parasite through that?

Yes, it is possible, is it likely? Absolutely not, I have never done it personally and many of you may have seen my other videos on how I set up black lights in my garden to attract insects. I have used many wild feeders over the years and have never been able to link them. the death of a mantis from one cause is due to using a feeder caught in the wild for whatever reason so a lot of that is exaggerated when you see it on the internet many people will disagree and disagree with feelings intense. On that topic, I speak only based on my experience, which is quite extensive.

I'm just going to say that for these house flies, the trick to using them as outlined in my house fly care video at this link is to put them in the refrigerator for a while. These are very active flies in flight right now. Adult flies that hatched from these pupal cocoons basically, that's how I sell them and they will hatch in a couple of days or a couple or a week or so. If you get them depending on whether you keep them in the refrigerator or not, the pup, I mean, you put these adults here in the refrigerator and they will slow down, deactivate their flight muscles, leaving them unable to fly and then you can just open them up.

This lid will still move around a little bit, but then you can quickly, with the lid off, throw them in the container here and then open the lid again very quickly and your mantis will be able to feed as the mantis grows and If it's bigger, it will you offer more and more flies, for example, or larger feeders. Can you use crickets from the pet store? Yes, as the written care sheet indicates, you can do this. However, you'll probably want to adapt those pet store crickets to a diet at home for a week or two before you start. then in turn feed them to your mantises.

There are concerns with pet store crickets about their cleanliness and about a disease or condition, a disease called the brown substance of death that causes mantids to vomit on the sides of their containers and eventually die in some cases. and it is thought to be cleaning or bacterial problems, perhaps from pet store crickets, that can cause mantids to get sick, so in a perfect world you wouldn't use pet store crickets, no matter what. However, they are very large and when you have adult mantises, you really need so many flies now, I sometimes offer blue bottle flies that have a mass about three times the mass of these flies and I mentioned them on the care sheet as well.

I tend not to have them as much during the warmer months because they are a little harder to work with in warmer climates, but in the colder months I tend to have pupae available of that larger bluebottle fly species, available on site web too, so you know, you can feed four of them with the blue bottle flies. It will be equivalent to the mass or intestinal load of a pet store cricket, a large one, so it is an option. Some people use mealworms from pet stores. Mealworms can possibly bite and young mantids have softer bodies than older mantids.

I wouldn't hesitate to feed them. to adult mantises for example, because even if the mealworm were to nibble on them a little bit, their exoskeletons are much harder and they will eat the mealworm much faster than a young mantis and that's something you can use as well in a pinch yes If you are wary of crickets and have run out of other feeder or fly options, it can be a little expensive to order feeder flies online over and over again for a year, so having access to other feeders at Sometimes it's good from a financial perspective.

You can also check your porch light at night, you may find crane flies there, even in winter, there are small crane flies called winter crane flies, other mosquitoes, even mosquitoes, you can leave a window open or your door open in the warmer months or even in autumn. and spring and sometimes some insects fly around and they will be in your windows because they are usually looking for the light so another thing you can do is go get a net at a dollar store just go out to the grass or where you see flowers and you just run the net over the flowers or through the grass and then look inside and you will find some little insects crawling around and that is a really cheap and easy way to get feeders for your pet mantis as well as feeding yourself.

I want to have a little spray bottle like this just once in a while. Where is my mantis right down there at the bottom? It is still very unusual for a mantis to be at the bottom. I'm going to tap a little here to knock down any fruit flies. spray a little on the side of your container like this and if your substrate looks dry, spray a little down into the substrate. I have this on the jet setting. I'm going to keep it on this floor here. I prefer it to be on that finer mist setting, younger mantids can get trapped through adhesion in water droplets, this doesn't usually happen.

I never send my clients any star mantises first when they hatch from the eggs, they are called first in Stars once they molt again they are called second instars, they molt once more, they shed their skin it is called molting their third instar after They have shed their skin twice, so it is important to give them a little drink every day now if you still see water droplets on the side of your tank the next day. No need to spray there again. This is a very well ventilated lid here on the top of these crops. It is actually a mixture of fabric and paper.

It is called poly and poly fiber. lid and therefore breathes very well, there are many holes through the plastic. If you have a less limited and limited ventilation environment like some of the other commercial cages out there, you may want to drill a few more holes. that type of lid or misting less frequently is always a little trick because the temperature in every two houses is different and the type of container that each two keepers use may be a little different, the depth of the substrate and how moist they keep it. will affect the humidity in the container and again that humidity is very important when the mantis is shedding its skin so keep the substrate moist and offer your mantis a little drink by spraying some fine mist, can you see these drops? on the side wall of the container near the mantis is good now if the mantis has been sitting in one place and refuses the food on the top of the container, it looks like it is getting ready to molt, maybe then you don't want to spray the mantis directly .

I don't want to bother at all, I don't want to continually add flies or insects of any kind into the container if you are feeding your mantis roaches or crickets and it sheds its skin, those feeders can really eat. your mantis, so if your mantis refuses to eat then you want to take out the unconsumed feeders now, these little fruit flies here and because I know this mantis actually just molted because I can see its exoskeleton up there on the lid of this container, just molted in the last 24 hours, so I know it will be a minimum of a few weeks before it molts again the older a mantis is, the longer the time between molts, young mantises, uh, first to second into star and then second, then stars molting to third instar usually only takes a week or two between those moles, but as the mantis grows, it will take a little longer to wear out, perhaps between being a subadult, which is what we call mantises that are just one mole away from being mature and the next molt to maturity, that last period of time between molts will be about a month, maybe even two months depending on how warm you keep the mantis and how often you feed it.

This is a giant Asian mantis that just molted. a day ago and it has a nice pale coloring, put it here on my hat, you can see it while we talk a little more. Another question I get a lot is how much should I feed my mantises and how often, and that's a really great question. Tough question to answer, it depends a little on how hot your tank is. A warm mantis will metabolize its food and grow faster than a cold mantis if you keep it between 60 and 70 degrees instead of 70 and 80 or even up to 85, there are some species that need even more heat, but I don't usually offer it. through the website.

You will need to feed them more or less frequently. The goal of feeding is to keep the abdomen full and It is virtually impossible to give a single answer to someone about how often they should be fed and that is because even the flies in a fruit fly culture, for example, a new crop will produce larger flies on a month-old crop. or even six weeks old will produce more stunted flies because the medium tends to dry out a little and the flies become smaller and stunted and only have about half the mass, so if I tell someone to feed two flies of fruit to their young mantises, then they may be underfeeding it and, um, I always recommend people look at their mantis's abdomen, which can be hard to judge if you're a new keeper, so Another test is to simply feed your mantis.

If it rejects food, it is not hungry. Now a mantis rarely rejects food. A myth heard in the hobby quite often is that if I feed my mantis too much, it will explode. No, your mantis will not explode. That will never happen. There is a small chance. that if you keep them too cold, say around 60 degrees or something, and you've just fed him a bunch of crickets or something and his abdomen is huge and bulbous, he won't be able to metabolize his food properly at that temperature. a really cold temperature and although the abdomen won't explode, the mantis could end up dying because it was too cold to metabolize that excessive amount of food in its stomach, but that almost never happens, so, fatness, that's it. about fatness and this is a really hard thing to teach someone or demonstrate in a video, but I'll try to do it here so you can see it and I'll go get a couple of mantises and we'll take a look.

So here are two mantises and this one here has a thinner abdomen, while the abdomen of this one here is a little bit plumper. This one isn't so plump that she won't eat more food, but this one here is thin and So I could probably feed this one seven houseflies before she has a completely plump abdomen and this one here maybe three or four houseflies. These are Creo Broder Jamaitus jeweled flower mantises and they are tolerating each other's presence quite well for this video. and I'm going to move them again here in these cups to demonstrate a little bit what fat means.

I will keep in mind that your mantises will not starve in general if they are well fed within a week, of course as a pet. As caregivers, we want to provide optimal dietary care for our mantises, so while they don't need to eat every day like humans do, they will accept food on a regular basis if you offer it and want it. Ideally you want to keep them somewhere in the 80 degree range, on average 75 is ok 85 is ok 70 even ok in general, if you are comfortable they won't be uncomfortable, but for optimal growth it is best to warm up and so Of course, at night your house gets cold. down, um, the mantises, you know, I ship them as you know all the time and they can actually get to almost freezing without being damaged during shipping and they can also tolerate temperatures if they're not enclosed in a live container. sunlight or something where it's a lot warmer, but you know, if it was 100 degrees outside and there was a mantis, as many of you in warm places know, sitting in a bush or something, I would look for a shady place but still so it would be exposed. at temperatures of 100 degrees and survived fine, so optimally we'll keep them somewhere close to home temperature, room temperature a little warmer, you better do it if you can, if you can't, don't beat yourself up too much for that.

The advantage of keeping a mantis in slightly colder temperatures is that it will actually live for your entire life. The next topic here is shedding and we talked a little bit about having that textured surface up there. You can also achieve a textured surface by pinching a strip of paper. towel, you know, a little longer than the width of this cap, just pinching that, it works, you can run one over the side, most mantids like this one here can climb smooth surfaces, but there are some species of blankets and I always indicated it on my website. by the way, oh, that one just caught a fly, alwaysI indicated on my website if there are species that can't climb glass but most can or the plastic walls of the tank, you can put sticks in there, lots of people do that either way.

The textured surface higher up in the tank will potentially offer them a molting platform that they need to be hanging on to something and I'll show some clips here at this point in the video to demonstrate why they need to be hanging on. because they descend from their old skin with the help of gravity to shed, what did you do? You are much bigger. I just posted a video of this banded flower mantis today and she went and shed her skin. You can see that she is an adult. the wings have not unfolded yet, he is going to spread them, they will expand as he pumps hemolymph or blood into them and they will be much longer than his abdomen and very pretty, very soon he will take another video in about an hour exercising those new wings, not quite dry but her wings are still hardening so I'm not going to pick her up or handle her yet, but what a beautiful mantis.

This is a dead leaf mantis dereplatus truncata that appears here in the hat, we'll talk a little bit. More about growth and mantises. I'm going to give you a link here to another video on breeding mantises. We're not going to talk about that in today's video, but um, males and females mature at different rates, so if you have more than one mantis, if you have a male and a female, your goal is to breed them, you'll want to slow down a bit. little to the males, do not feed them. As often as you feed the females, you can keep them a little cooler than the females if you raise them both from the same starting point, say a second or third instar, young mantis, nymph, immature mantis.

By the way, they are called nymphs, so the females will usually need a couple of extra babies in addition to the males to mature, which can make raising them quite tricky because female mantids also tend to live a little longer than male mantids. . Thank you all for watching this. video I hope you found it informative. I know a lot more about mantises, but this was already a very long video and the real goal of this video is to serve my clients as concisely as possible on general mantis care information. A lot of this really is because most things are learned as you go, there's no better way to learn than by doing it, and sometimes it takes a couple of experiences with mantises before you really figure out how to give them the best care. .

I'm going to take this mattress off my face and turn off the camera. If you like me, give me one of those thumbs up and subscribe and hit the bell so you know when I'll post next. Share me with your friends on social networks. Thanks for looking