Praying Mantis

lovley pic! never seen one except in photos or nature documentaries. do you get may of them?

me too...awesome creature...

what gets me about them is that their eyes move independently, they can look in opposite directions at the same time - or am I thinking of chameleons??

At the first sight I read "praying mantras", lol.

Yeah I see several of them a year. They kill A LOT of bugs, they are crazy good predators. Usually they are all brown or all green, I had never seen a green and brown one before. Their eyes do not move independently but they can turn their head almost full circle it seems like.

ah, right. remember now, seeing a pic of a mantis head on - great big eyes in trangular wedge-shaped head. Very efficient predators and luckily for gardeners, they prey on what are pests to us. Never really thought about their olours before: when seeing slow-mo film of htem in action, wasn't the first thing to catch my attention! but maybe a new blend, to meet new hunting territory?

They are very efficient predators but they don't discriminate from bad and good bugs unfortunately. I have seen them eating ladybugs, bees, katydids, cicadas, grasshoppers, locusts and each other. They would probably eat birds if they could catch them haha. Overall I think I see them killing more bad bugs than good ones but they do eat a lot of bees in my yard.

ouch. well, i suppose to them anything that comes wihtin range counts as "food" - maybe if an area is overrun with what we'd call pests, they'd do a good job.