Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren vogle bum here with a classic episode
Speaker 1: from our podcast archives. There are a lot of myths
Speaker 1: out there about animal behavior that stem from assumptions that
Speaker 1: people made in the past, either out in the world
Speaker 1: or in the science lab. So how does the tail
Speaker 1: that female praying mantis is decapitate their mates hold up?
Speaker 1: It was the premise of an episode in season one
Speaker 1: of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, So it must be true, right, Hi,
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren vogle bam here. It's long been an
Speaker 1: excitedly repeated myth that female praying mantis is have no
Speaker 1: problem engaging in violent, cannibalistic murder when confronted with a
Speaker 1: friendly mate, perhaps because school classrooms often host terrariums with
Speaker 1: mantis subjects. It's one of those rumors that even children
Speaker 1: seem to know. Don't breed with a female mantis lest
Speaker 1: your head becomes her dinner. Sounds scary, but is it
Speaker 1: true to the females of the species actually eat or
Speaker 1: decapitate their mate, or are they simply being maligned by
Speaker 1: alarmed men who perhaps empathize a little too much with
Speaker 1: their insect brethren. The key to understanding these questions is
Speaker 1: the word species, because while we might have a picture
Speaker 1: of a standard looking green mantis in our head, there
Speaker 1: are actually two thousand, four hundred species of the sucker.
Speaker 1: Some are colorful, some are creepy, and some, yes, some
Speaker 1: are cannibals. But before we get into the occasionally cruel
Speaker 1: lifestyle of the female mantis, let's take a second to
Speaker 1: examine the basis of the naybe myth. What we discover
Speaker 1: is that the myth is rooted in well documented science.
Speaker 1: In an eight eight six observation from the journal Science,
Speaker 1: entomologist Leland Assian Howard noted that on placing a male
Speaker 1: mantis with a female, the female systematically proceeded to eat
Speaker 1: the male's left leg, left eye, and right leg, and
Speaker 1: then decapitate him and eat his head. The male, keep
Speaker 1: in mind, was attempting to mate with her the whole time,
Speaker 1: which she eventually acquiesced to with her headless and mostly
Speaker 1: legless partner. While Howard stressed that he had never seen
Speaker 1: it before, he also rather breathlessly stated, it seems to
Speaker 1: be only by accident that a male ever escapes alive
Speaker 1: from the embraces of his partner. We see how this
Speaker 1: could make everyone think that mantis ladies were nothing but
Speaker 1: bloodthirsty harpies. But remember Howard saw this once with one
Speaker 1: species of mantis, Mantis Carolina. Decapitation or cannibalism went on
Speaker 1: to be observed in Mantis religiosa as well, and a
Speaker 1: few other scientists studied the question of why decapitation would
Speaker 1: be useful for mating. Some theories the decapitation might cause
Speaker 1: sexual movements in the male abdomen, or perhaps part of
Speaker 1: the thorax might actually inhibit sexual movements. Both theories were
Speaker 1: later proved false. So here's the real deal. Female mantises
Speaker 1: have occasionally been observed to cannibalize and decapitate their mates,
Speaker 1: but by and large doesn't seem to be the case.
Speaker 1: A study in animal behavior made it forty pairs of
Speaker 1: 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 a reputation as a
Speaker 1: man eator. Today's episode was written by Kate Kirshner and
Speaker 1: produced by Tristan McNeil and Tyler Klang. For more on
Speaker 1: this and lots of other curious topics, visit how stuffworks
Speaker 1: dot com. Brainstuff is production of I heart Radio. For
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