Pet Orchid Mantis Care Sheet Hymenopus coronatus Kung Fu Mantid #orchidmantis #petmantises #mantis

So here we are, these

orchid

mantis

es got mail right there in the middle of the flower and up here a surprise, just a surprise because it blends in perfectly. This female is much larger than the male, but a surprise for you, rest, this is yours. woman sending it to you I really enjoyed collaborating with you on this video about worker

mantis

es. Everyone please go and watch Russ's aquarium x pets youtube channel to see my interview about these magical creatures camouflage themselves. Many animals like this leafy sea dragon use camouflage to hide. their predators or, in the case of this

orchid

mantis, attract them and for hundreds of years it was believed that these orchid mantises imitated orchids, but in 2014 a team of scientists that included O'Hanlon, his Burstein and Hall determined that in In general, they have evolved to look like flowers, not a specific type of flower, but they look like the pollinators they feed on, yes, this insect flies very quickly from one place to another, from flower to flower, orchid mantises They look a lot like a flower in your eyes, so these pollinators will approach the orchid mantis which, of course, is just waiting to catch them in the air and feed on them.

Very effective strategy. Another animal, this leafy sea dragon, here uses its camouflage to hide from predators, but these. Orchid mantises use a strategy called aggressive mimicry to aerate prey that approaches them. Beautiful animals and we will explore them in today's video from start to finish. We will look at the entire life cycle from egg to egg. The case is also called Oh to Thika, which is the singular Oh to these, is the plural: nymphs, including the first instar hatchlings, which are red and black first in the stars, refer to new baby mantises that have just hatched. hatch from their eggs.

After they shed their skin the first time they are considered second instars, something interesting happened today. This video is about Orkut Mantises and Ghost Mantises, two of the most spectacular species in the pet hobby and today we have babies of both species and one incubation container became quite a bit. some egg cases up there and they both hatched here in the last 24 hours. Orchid mantises are the cute little black and red ones and ghost mantises have that little horn on their head just like the pink and white adults, such curious people. I always enjoy seeing the feeding demonstrations available.

It seems like this Orkut has taken forever to bloom, but it's finally happening. These beautiful white flowers, oh just a little out of focus, sorry, they are very pink. They get like this when they get close to molting. You can see that the buds on their wings are thickened. It still has a few days left, but tomorrow it will be even darker. He's right on camera, so in the last two clips you see mantises getting older and older and shedding their skin. they are a little bit bigger and that's how they grow, they have exoskeletons and therefore their structural system is different from ours or the bones inside our bodies are on the outside and in the next clip I want to give them a little head . above it is quite graphic, you will see a blue bottle fly that is being eaten by a probably fifth instar female orchid mantis and it is still alive and the Mantis is actively consuming it as it moves if you are sensitive to that kind of thing I encourage you.

To skip ahead for a few minutes to a later part of the video, I don't see any orchid mantis, they are peeking out from behind their prey, they just closed their skin yesterday and just had their first meal since then, take it a little closer here. They like to live prey and they're going to put a magnifying glass here so we can look even closer at the eyes and jaws. This is the mouth of an orchid and at this point it has removed the head of its prey. Bottle fly In the following clips we take a look at the reproduction of orchid mantises.

The main reason why orchid mantises are not very common in the hobby is that breeding this species is particularly difficult for several reasons, firstly, they are difficult to acquire, they are also very expensive if you have the opportunity to find some as a pet and then the males mature much faster than the females, which if you start with a group of five, for example, you will find that the males mature months before the females and that the males, having a shorter life, They often become extinct before the females are ready. Many people believe that inbreeding is a problem with this species, which may or may not be true.

I generally think the main bottleneck is not having enough of them in your breeding pool plus not being able to get them from another breeder at any time when your females are ready but your males are gone, another reason why are difficult to breed will be seen in the following In some clips, it is shown how much smaller the males are than the females and the females in many species of mantis are very aggressive with almost everything that moves near them and that is of a size that they could consider as prey. Obviously NOT myself on the menu, but a small male orchid mantis, they fly extremely well and are very good at evading the females, they jump on their backs and find this kind of safety zone where the females can't turn around and grab them and rest there for a moment and will beat the female's drum to show their interest in her.

She usually can't reach them when they're just starting out because they're kind of in a blind spot for her, but they do gauge that she's receptive. They will slowly move down to a much more vulnerable position because their abdomen is above and below their wings and because they need to slide down and curve their abdomen around and under to touch the ends, basically maintaining this familiarity, the male finds himself in a very vulnerable position when he is there and if the female changes her mind about the ordeal, at any moment she can turn around and grab him and eat him and in the wild the males are quite abundant and because they fly so well, they often They will come around quite frequently and the females will decide if they are in the mood to breed or have lunch.

Courtship of fruit flies. You can see that they are probably males chasing the females. This is also happening down here with these orchid mattresses. This is a pair of mating orchid mantises. I can see that the female is considerably larger than the male. I'm not very happy with this. I was distracted from the view for just a few minutes. The male was perfectly positioned on her back. I just posted a little story here on Instagram telling you about the spiny flower mantis that I was going to breed today and how I had to be overly

care

ful with them because he was my only male this forked male was my best breeder I think he fertilized several females this female in particular here her cup lid had said attacker because on May 16, I don't know, about ten days ago, she attacked a male, but I was able to save him, not this one, she is eating his head right now, if he is interested in her, he will play there with his front paws on her back are a kind of signal to her that he is interested in mating with her and, while he plays the drum, you will often move a little, positioning his body more and more. close so that the tip of your abdomen tilts up and around to touch. the tip of her and therefore her large wings are in the way at the moment and he will have to position himself slowly without disturbing her too much.

There he dresses the drumming and they will usually move slightly at the time they drum and I. I think they gained some confidence every time they do it too when they play the drum and then she doesn't stop what she's doing and turns around and rips it off her back and eats them so we'll check this out again in A little time to see if you haven't found yourself in a better position. Well good news, these two have been mating steadily for about two hours and they will feed her, make her big and pretty and I hope she produces that case of eggs here very soon. everyone is always asking for updates on orchid mantises, here you go, maybe I was throwing out the spermatophore in the mail, but now there's another group, it's probably just poop, not right, not right.

I know, I'm sorry, today is my birthday and we have a little Christmas miracle here. This was one of my two female orchid mantises with eggs and I could see that she looked a little thinner and that's why she's a good size for a very happy case because this lady here was fertilized before, but they both have He been fertilized for over two months and now, happy birthday to me, and that hit right there. The orchid mantis, sometimes called the pink orchid mantis, specimens can be quite pink, they are usually white, but as they approach molting they sometimes become quite pink. a little bit and then for a few weeks at least before molting they will be very pink and then shortly after molting they will be slightly pink and then the white most of the time you can see the green which I I call a necklace on this. specimen and that is a sign that she is a female at this stage, which I think is probably the fourth instar, if she were a male, not only would that collar be a brownish red color, the wing buds would also be quite evident .

I'm going to get a little closer here. It was quite fascinating to watch them feed, although a little disturbing to see the live fly being consumed by its predator. Use this opportunity to also illustrate how to sex

mantid

s. See where the pair of back legs connect? We're actually in the thorax and just before the abdomen starts, insects have three body parts, the head, which is pretty obvious, connects to the thorax. They are in the middle where the three pairs of legs, the insects have six legs attached to the thorax and then the abdomen there as this mantis consumes this fly, you can actually see through the translucent body of this mantis as it feeds the dark contents of their food that goes down the middle of their body and will end up there in the abdomen, now female mantises will.

Get a little closer here. Female mantises have six abdominal segments and males have eight, so you can see a sort of inverted triangular segment. They are just behind where the legs join the thorax, which would be the first segment to count. and just above the second segment there is a small black patch of debris there in the third segment the fourth segment just below the reddish band there and then the fifth segment or above that and then right on top another triangular section which is the sixth segment here on this orchid mantis I apologize for the shaking here with this magnification it's hard to keep my hand still when I'm handing this out freely.

I have the Mantis in my left hand and I'm holding the camera as still as I can. with my iPhone here in my right hand and there's something juicy for you right there, another interesting thing to point out, you'll notice that this Mantis's eyes are kind of pink at night, her eyes actually darken and I don't know if this It's true or not, but because they are dark and I have always suspected that it helps them see at night, it may be comparable in some ways to the way our pupils and eyes dilate to let in more light and be able to see better at night. low light conditions. also the pointed front legs, their predatory mantises and are designed very, very perfectly for the task.

Another thing to point out here, you see this abdomen is kind of plump, actually it probably could be, maybe I don't know another third of how thick it is. I guess this mantis could probably consume three more flies before it decides to move on to the next one and we'll see if I have another example here so you can see that this second instar mantis is considerably smaller than its fourth or fifth instar. counterpart here, I would normally feed these smaller ones fruit flies, while these larger ones were feeding houseflies right now, now you can feed them pet store crickets, small pet store crickets, and of course you'll need crickets They may be pinheads or one week or two weeks for the smaller ones, but many people in the hobby will advise you that feeding your

mantid

s crickets is always a bit risky because sometimes the crickets will make your mantid sick and produce what both scientists and obvious call the brown substance of death. and is believed to be a bacterial infection that is transmitted from crickets to mantises, many people find that if they buy crickets at the pet store and then feed them a healthy diet for a while, fruits, vegetables, maybe some dog food or other type of pet food that will somehow cleanse the crickets' systems and make them healthy enough to feed to the mantids, but it is always a small risk and certainly their feeding response is better for the flying prey than for crawling prey, although ghost mantises are quite good when it comes to feeding, they are quite aggressive, ghost mantises are much more demanding than our devil flowers when it comes to their preference forflying prey over crawling prey, hey, if you liked me, give me one of those thumbs up and subscribe. and hit the bell so you know when I'll post next.

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