praying mantisauri week

It must be time for the praying mantisauri to come out, as I have encountered four mantises in the past couple days. Four! Wowiwiwowwow! First, I found Dwayne on Thursday on the wall of my apartment complex.

From mantisauri

I caught him and put him in a cookie box, as I had had a pet praying mantis last year and she was an awesome pet. I then spent too much time that I should have been working on finishing my infinishable journal paper digging in the dirt and catching bugs to feed to Dwayne. I put a bunch of roly polys (see my exposé on roly polys here), then a couple snails in Dwayne's box, but he didn't seem interested at all. I thought maybe he was a choosy mantis and did not like thick exoskeletons, so that evening I also caught him a cricket and a juicy caterpillar. Still, he did not seem interested! I gave him til Saturday morning to think about what he was doing, at which point all the juicy bugs were dead and crispy at the bottom of the box, then I let him go. There are a bunch of photos of our long goodbye on Picasa here.

While I was getting leaves to make Dwayne's box more homey, I saw this guy, let's call him Crudmuncher, on the wall.

From mantisauri

I put Dwayne in this plant in my apartment complex, where there happened to be another mantis, we'll call him Death from Above:

From mantisauri

Okay, last one! We found Mean Green Eugene yesterday while walking from our picnic at Caltech to our snack at Starbucks.

From mantisauri

I caught her and put her in my lunch box for safe keeping. It is perhaps wrong that I am still catching bugs and keeping them in my lunch box. Anyways, Mean Green Eugene is an awesome pet! I put her in another cookie box, and have fed her a bunch of juicy spiders (see above photo). She is ruthless! I took a video of her eating the last spider, which also had a nice juicy egg sac attached. It's not all that interesting, as she is in her cookie box and you can't see her that well, but, whatever: