Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hi brain
Speaker 1: Stuff Lauren vocal bamb here. It's long been an excitedly
Speaker 1: repeated myth that female praying mantis is have no problem
Speaker 1: engaging in violent, cannibalistic murder when confronted with a friendly mate,
Speaker 1: perhaps because school classrooms often host terrariums with mantis subjects.
Speaker 1: It's one of those rumors that even children seem to know.
Speaker 1: Don't breed with a female mantis lest your head becomes
Speaker 1: her dinner. Sounds scary, but is it true. Do the
Speaker 1: females of the species actually eat or decapitate their mates,
Speaker 1: or are they simply being maligned by alarmed men who
Speaker 1: perhaps empathize a little too much with their insect brethren.
Speaker 1: The key to understanding these questions is the word species,
Speaker 1: because while we might have a picture of a standard
Speaker 1: looking green mantis in our head, there are actually two thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred species of the sucker. Some are colorful, some
Speaker 1: are creepy, and some, yes, some are cannibals. But before
Speaker 1: we get into the occasionally cruel lifestyle of the female mantis,
Speaker 1: let's take a second to examine the basis of the
Speaker 1: naybe myth. What we discover is that the myth is
Speaker 1: rooted in well documented science. In an eight six observation
Speaker 1: from the journal Science, entomologist Leland Assian Howard noted that
Speaker 1: on placing a male mantis with a female, the female
Speaker 1: systematically proceeded to eat the male's left leg, left eye,
Speaker 1: and right leg, and then decapitate him and eat his head.
Speaker 1: The male, keep in mind, was attempting to mate with
Speaker 1: her the whole time, which she eventually acquiesced to with
Speaker 1: her headless and mostly legless partner. While Howard stressed that
Speaker 1: he had never seen it before, he also rather breathlessly stated,
Speaker 1: it seems to be only by accident that a male
Speaker 1: ever escapes alive from the embraces of his partner. We
Speaker 1: see how this could make everyone think that mantis ladies
Speaker 1: were nothing but bloodthirsty harpies. But remember Howard saw this
Speaker 1: once with one species of mantis, Mantis Carolina. Decapitation or
Speaker 1: cannibalism went on to be observed in Mantis religiosa as well,
Speaker 1: and a few other scientists studied the question of why
Speaker 1: decapitation would be useful for mating. Some theories the decapitation
Speaker 1: might cause sexual movements in the male abdomen, or perhaps
Speaker 1: part of the thorax, might actually inhibit sexual movements. Both
Speaker 1: theories were later proved false. So here's the real deal.
Speaker 1: Female mantises have occasionally been observed to cannibalize and decapitate
Speaker 1: their mates, but by and large doesn't seem to be
Speaker 1: the case. Study in animal behavior made it forty pairs
Speaker 1: of mantis is only one was decapitated in almost seventy encounters.
Speaker 1: Bottom line, you can stop with the cliche female mantis jokes.
Speaker 1: Dating is hard enough. Nobody needs reputation as a man eater.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Kate Kirshner and produced by
Speaker 1: Tristan McNeil. For more on this and lots of other
Speaker 1: myth busting topics, visit our home planet has to Works
Speaker 1: dot com