September 7, 2006
-
Here is a picture from revsteve This poor thing had a mangled wing so he gave it a fling with some yummy lun-ching. That was some gory but clean rap. Look at this! He even trained it to do tricks!
And here is another very interesting story about mantis romance entitled "Eating Your Husband for Dinner" - oh my!!
"It was several years ago that I witnessed this extraordinary procedure, but I remember, and confess, an inescapable feeling that I was watching something not real and present, but a horrible nature movie, a "secrets-of-nature" short, beautifully photographed in full color, that I had to sit through unable to look anywhere else but at the dimly lighted EXIT signs along the walls, and that behind the scenes some amateur moviemaker was congratulating himself on having stumbled across this little wonder, or even on having contrived so natural a setting, as though the whole scene had been shot very carefully in a terrarium in someone's greenhouse.
I was ambling across this hill that day when I noticed a speck of pure white. The hill is eroded; the slope is a rutted wreck of red clay broken by grassy hillocks and low wild roses whose roots clasp a pittance of topsoil. I leaned to examine the white thing and saw a mass of bubbles like spittle. Then I saw something dark like an engorged leech rummaging over the spittle, and then I saw the praying mantis.
She was upside-down, clinging to a horizontal stem of wild rose by her feet which pointed to heaven. Her head was deep in dried grass. Her abdomen was swollen like a smashed finger; it tapered to a fleshy tip out of which bubbled a wet, whipped froth. I couldn't believe my eyes. I lay on the hill this way and that, my knees in thorns and my cheeks in clay, trying to see as well as I could.
I poked near the female's head with a grass; she was clearly undisturbed, so I settled my nose an inch from that pulsing abdomen. It puffed like a concertina, it throbbed like a bellows; it roved, pumping, over the glistening, clabbered surface of the egg case testing and patting, thrusting and smoothing. It seemed to act so independently that I forgot the panting brown stick at the other end. The bubble creature seemed to have two eyes, a frantic little brain, and two busy, soft hands. It looked like a hideous, harried mother slicking up a fat daughter for a beauty pageant, touching her up, slobbering over her, patting and hemming and brushing and stroking.
The male was nowhere in sight. The female had probably eaten him. Fabre says that, at least in captivity, the female will mate with and devour up to seven males, whether she has laid her egg cases or not. The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of the male insect says, in effect, "No, don't go near her, you fool, she'll eat you alive." At the same time a chemical in his abdomen says, "Yes, by all means, now and forever yes."
While the male is making up what passes for his mind, the female tips the balance in her favor by eating his head. He mounts her. Fabre describes the mating, which sometimes lasts six hours, as follows: The male, absorbed in the performance of his vital functions, holds the female in a tight embrace. But the wretch has no head; he has no neck; he has hardly a body. The other, with her muzzle turned over her shoulder continues very placidly to gnaw what remains of the gentle swain. And, all the time, that masculine stump, holding on firmly, goes on with the business! ... I have seen it done with my own eyes and have not yet recovered from my astonishment."
Now isn't this a lovely thing that God made! I saw it on the way to school this morning. It is a ground cherry plant that has rotted away on the outside to reveal itself as a hanging basket for a package of seeds!
And this from Herr Compukermann:
Thanks for the comment, Heather. I am so impressed that I am going to comment about it here. Heather says that her husband is a back-seat channel changer and that she is the remote - remote... My answer:
A BACK SEAT CHANNEL CHANGER??? NOOOO0000oooo!! I am rolling on my keyboard!!! No, no, no, and no again, we have sooooooo much channel surfing going on I just could not take that. Haven't seen a complete commercial in years. I would not even consider attempting to control the remote. Why do that to myself? I don't wanna die on that hill, for sure. Give him the thing for goodness sake, and make him surf his own channels. A remote control is actually a hunting weapon in the hands of the male half of the population. They don't actually go out hunting for bigger rabbits, ducks, bears or whatever. They just hunt for better programs. Maybe is is like the way women shop, come to think of it. I don't think our remote control has ever had my fingerprints on it!! I am still giggling.
