More crawling things

So we loved the butterflies so much, we decided to get the ladybugs and praying mantis egg, too.

The mantis egg case arrived unharmed, and we set it up in the proper enclosure, and waited.


It was fantastic timing.  The day after we released the ladybugs, we woke up to this:


Lots of tiny little mantises!

We dropped in some bananas for them to eat as a snack until we could get the feeder insects.

We were going to release all but one, and we set up a tank for it to live.

He looks very happy!  We named him Spear.

I never realized how little they were as nymphs.  And these are Chinese Mantises.  They're the biggest species in North America.

Snack time!

We released them, and put one on the spawn's strawberry plant, to guard against nasty insects.


Time for another snack!

He's got a voracious appetite, and loves to eat.  Right now he's eating little flightless fruit flies and growing fast.

We won't know for sure if he's a male or female until he gets bigger.  But he's an adorable little guy!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betta care 101: Introduction

Image
Betta fish are probably the most popular pet fish, eclipsing even the trusty goldfish.  Remarkably intelligent, with big personalities and a wonderful inquisitive nature, it's not hard to see why. And of course, they're just stunning to look at. But so many of them are doomed to terrible, short lives, not because of cruel people, but because of good people who have been misinformed. So where is all the misinformation coming from? Alright, so I was talking to my ex boyfriend the other night (we parted ways amicably because of distance a couple months ago), and mentioned Grim and all his health problems. My ex made the comment, talking about the bettas he's had with his spawn, "we always either get one that lives forever or dies quick. There's no in between." I started to reply, but he said, "sometimes we can get them to live like 3 years." ... Wait, what ? 3 years is living forever? I told him most of mine live
Read more

The twins

Image
Nephthys and Osiris are my twin halfmoons.  They live together in a 10 gallon divided tank, where they've lived ever since I bought them as babies about a year ago. Their colors are blue and red/orange, so I designed their tank to sort of complement that. They enjoy their home, but there was something that bothered me. Some way, some how, Neph was sneaking into Osiris' side.  Regularly. As in, at least once or twice a week. And I had no idea how she was doing it. Of course, as soon as I saw it, I would have a mini heart attack, immediately scoop her up, and put her back on her side.  And that would work for a couple days.  Until she'd go back over again. I mean, I guess it wasn't a huge  deal.  Osiris will flare and charge whenever he sees another male, but he was always gentle with her.  Of course there was the occasional nip or chase, that's to be expected.  It was his territory, not hers, and bettas are just a smidge territor
Read more

Betta Care 101: Part One

Image
Part One: Tank requirements. So you've decided you want a fish.  Where are you going to put it? Well, first we'll address the idea of fishbowls, small tanks, and unfiltered systems. These are just too small.  These bettas will not only die early, but they'll be unhappy and depressed the entire time. But even the bigger fishbowls, such as 1 gallon bowls, are a bad idea. Why?  Well, lots of reasons. 1.  They can jump. And they will  jump, if they have reason to.  Coming home to find your fishbowl empty and your betta dead on the floor isn't super common, but it does happen.  Your tank needs a lid. 2.  It's too small to keep them healthy.   I'm going to get into water values and things in a later post, but for now you need to know that all fish produce ammonia, which is unbelievably toxic to them.  The smaller the tank, the faster that ammonia builds up.  A one-gallon, unfiltered bowl needs 50% water changes twice a day  to keep the ammonia
Read more