Last spring, we ordered a caterpillar kit from an educational company Insect Lore and monitored the metamorphosis from larvae to butterflies. This year, after seeing an advertisement in April for a buy-one-get-one (egg case)-free, we tried again with watching the life cycle of praying mantises, which the kids have learned about in various books.
We ordered the egg cases (oothecas) and planned to delay their arrival until after we were back from Jamaica in April, as I didn't want any inadvertent premature hatching while we were out of town (we also had to mist the habitat once per week). However, they were not shipped as requested and they've been hanging out in our laundry room since April. We read that they usually hatch into little mantis nymphs in a few weeks (but could take up to twelve).
This week (after about eight weeks), the tiny nymphs suddenly hatched (although we can't figure out how they busted through the egg cases) and we saw hundreds of tiny mosquito-sized nymphs on the habitat walls.
The instructions were to not bother the nymphs while they were emerging but, soon after hatching, to release them as, being meat eating predators, they can cannibalize their weaker siblings if another food sources is not available.
The kids really enjoyed releasing the nymphs to our garden by shaking them near some plants and leaving the habitat open. Niall accidentally squashed a couple.
Iver was sooo excited to come home from school to check on his backyard mantises and and is already plotting how to raise one or two as a pet (named "Glow"), wanting to buy insects with his "own money" to sustain them (we told him to just forage in our yard. Apparently they like to eat live bugs including aphids, flies [fruit flies for the babies] and ladybugs).
Force-feeding an ant...
... and roly poly.
Iver's had previously been asking to get a snake as a pet which was a hard NO from me (I'm not big into creepy crawlies but things that slither are unacceptable). As long as the mantis stays in its netted habitat and he wants to feed it, I'm ok keeping it for now! We'll see if he can keep it alive. Apparently praying mantises live for about one year.
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