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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey

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Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren vogle bum here with a classic episode

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Speaker 1: from our podcast archives. There are a lot of myths

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Speaker 1: out there about animal behavior that stem from assumptions that

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Speaker 1: people made in the past, either out in the world

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Speaker 1: or in the science lab. So how does the tail

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Speaker 1: that female praying mantis is decapitate their mates hold up?

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Speaker 1: It was the premise of an episode in season one

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Speaker 1: of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, So it must be true, right, Hi,

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Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren vogle bam here. It's long been an

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Speaker 1: excitedly repeated myth that female praying mantis is have no

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Speaker 1: problem engaging in violent, cannibalistic murder when confronted with a

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Speaker 1: friendly mate, perhaps because school classrooms often host terrariums with

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Speaker 1: mantis subjects. It's one of those rumors that even children

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Speaker 1: seem to know. Don't breed with a female mantis lest

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Speaker 1: your head becomes her dinner. Sounds scary, but is it

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Speaker 1: true to the females of the species actually eat or

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Speaker 1: decapitate their mate, or are they simply being maligned by

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Speaker 1: alarmed men who perhaps empathize a little too much with

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Speaker 1: their insect brethren. The key to understanding these questions is

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Speaker 1: the word species, because while we might have a picture

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Speaker 1: of a standard looking green mantis in our head, there

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Speaker 1: are actually two thousand, four hundred species of the sucker.

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Speaker 1: Some are colorful, some are creepy, and some, yes, some

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Speaker 1: are cannibals. But before we get into the occasionally cruel

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Speaker 1: lifestyle of the female mantis, let's take a second to

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Speaker 1: examine the basis of the naybe myth. What we discover

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Speaker 1: is that the myth is rooted in well documented science.

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Speaker 1: In an eight eight six observation from the journal Science,

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Speaker 1: entomologist Leland Assian Howard noted that on placing a male

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Speaker 1: mantis with a female, the female systematically proceeded to eat

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Speaker 1: the male's left leg, left eye, and right leg, and

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Speaker 1: then decapitate him and eat his head. The male, keep

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Speaker 1: in mind, was attempting to mate with her the whole time,

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Speaker 1: which she eventually acquiesced to with her headless and mostly

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Speaker 1: legless partner. While Howard stressed that he had never seen

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Speaker 1: it before, he also rather breathlessly stated, it seems to

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Speaker 1: be only by accident that a male ever escapes alive

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Speaker 1: from the embraces of his partner. We see how this

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Speaker 1: could make everyone think that mantis ladies were nothing but

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Speaker 1: bloodthirsty harpies. But remember Howard saw this once with one

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Speaker 1: species of mantis, Mantis Carolina. Decapitation or cannibalism went on

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Speaker 1: to be observed in Mantis religiosa as well, and a

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Speaker 1: few other scientists studied the question of why decapitation would

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Speaker 1: be useful for mating. Some theories the decapitation might cause

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Speaker 1: sexual movements in the male abdomen, or perhaps part of

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Speaker 1: the thorax might actually inhibit sexual movements. Both theories were

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Speaker 1: later proved false. So here's the real deal. Female mantises

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Speaker 1: have occasionally been observed to cannibalize and decapitate their mates,

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Speaker 1: but by and large doesn't seem to be the case.

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Speaker 1: A study in animal behavior made it forty pairs of

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Speaker 1: mantis is only one was decapitated in almost seventy encounters.

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Speaker 1: Bottom line, you can stop with the cliche female mantis jokes.

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Speaker 1: Dating is hard enough. Nobody needs a reputation as a

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Speaker 1: man eator. Today's episode was written by Kate Kirshner and

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Speaker 1: produced by Tristan McNeil and Tyler Klang. For more on

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Speaker 1: this and lots of other curious topics, visit how stuffworks

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Speaker 1: dot com. Brainstuff is production of I heart Radio. For

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Speaker 1: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the our heart Radio app,

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Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,