A Prayer Before Dining

Abstract

HAPPY HOLIDAYS-fROM THE MANTIDS!! IF YOU STOP ALMOST ANY AVERAGE CITIZEN ON the street and ask him or her to provide you with three facts about insects, odds are good that one of those facts will be that the female praying mantis is a cannibal that is not above eating her own mates or children. Absolutely everyone seems to know this particular bit of insect lore and it's practically celebrated in popular culture. It's been featured in The Far Side cartoons (I don't know what you're insinuating, Jane, but I haven't seen your Harold all day-besides, surely you know I would only devour my own husband!) (Larson 1987) and it's even provided the plot for at least one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television (the one called Teacher's Pet, which, according to TV Guide, features a male high school student nearly seduced by a voluptuous substitute science teacher who transforms into a large praying mantis ... [And] what's more embarrassing than almost getting devoured by a femme fatale insect teacher? ) (Appelo and Williams 1999). Even people who can't keep straight in their minds the concept that spiders aren't insects seem comfortably fluent with the notion that praying mantids are unreconstructed sexual cannibals. Although it's true that consuming offspring is fairly widespread in the animal kingdom (Morris 1991) (as anyone who has tried to raise gouramis in a fish tank that's too small can attest), the sexual cannibalism thing is a source of particular fascination. Mantids are by no means the only arthropods that are reputed to engage in the practice-spiders, scorpions, amphipods, copepods, crickets, grasshoppers, antlions, and ground beetles are known to indulge from time to time. But mantids seem to hold a special place in the pantheon of sexual cannibals. After all, it's not pictures of cannibal copepods you see in the introductory biology textbooks. Figure 55-14b in Helena Curtis' Biology (Curtis 1983, p. 1032), for