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purple baby spiny flower mantis!

My little spiny flower mantids are molting, and two of them have a purple/black Wandering Jew in their enclosures so they have taken on the purple coloration! I can't wait to get them into all glass enclosures, it's so hard to get clear pics of them through the plastic.

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Wow those little guys are by far the neatest looking mantids I've seen. Do you treat them just like typical mantids?

I'll have to forage the backyard in the fall and see if I can find some egg sacks, always wanted to try raising some.
But to be completely honest you look like you're having way to much fun with these :p
 
Yann - flower mantids are amazing, but you should check out the Idolomantis diabolica if you want to see something really rare and spectacular....
not trying to shoot you down swords ;p i love flower mantids
 
LOL Swords, those things look awesome.
 
Yes, they are fun! You can take them out and handle them (let them explore) since they don't bite or make sudden movements. These exotic miniature types eat Blue Bottle flies I just order a cup of 100 pupae every month or so by mail. Keep the pupae in the fridge and just put one pupae in each terrarium every day when you do your daily misting (so the mantids can drink) and within 24-48 hours (or less) at room temp a fly will hatch and buzz around only to get eaten by the mantis pretty quickly. I don't have any large mantis species right now so I only feed a single fly a day. Keep an eye on their abdomens ("tails"), if they look plump they're fine, if they thin out get them more food. Try to get them an appropriate sized meal a day if you have warm temps since their metabolic processes are all faster in warm temps. When I get some larger species I will either use more flies per day or even large crickets and non-adult dubia roaches to feed the bigger ones. They will take food from tongs at any size and that's fun!

The leaf and flower mantids make some very comical movements, kind of like disco dancing! I'd love to make videos with my new camera of my various bug babies but I have no idea what to do once I've taken the video. How do I edit it to have just the good parts and maybe put music on it and text? Anyone have some hints/links for getting started using Windows movie maker?

Kris I'm not shot down at all, Idols are on my wantlist but nobody has any nymphs for sale at the moment but I don't have any more enclosures ready yet either so it's win/win for now. One guy in TX I'm in contact has breeding colonies of Idols, Violins, Dead Leafs, Ghosts, Flowers, other exotics... so I will get a few Idols someday - I've gotta have something to desire/crave! :D

I love how these flowers will adopt the colors of their surroundings within a molt or two. I put a Hygrophilla aquarium plant in with the other flower mantis and that plant turned maroon and that flower mantis currently has a red/brown pattern on white background and green legs. I always get thrown by their molts, Aw, it died... no wait, THERE it is!
 
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Video editing isn't hard, but it isn't exactly easy to explain either. Every piece of video software out there is a little different; they of course make it not-quite-straightforward so that you need to go buy a manual or classes. Mostly, though, they all boil down to timelines; you bring your video files into the editor, then in your project file you arrange the videos in sequence and trim off unwanted parts. You can have multiple sources (audio/video) displayed at once so on more sophisticated editors you'll have a grid with different tracks on one axis and time on the other. I have a feeling if you tinkered around with it you could figure it out; the software design concept is virtually identical to the audio sequencers you've used.
If you'd like I can put something together for you - I used to cut together the student news program back in high school. Just get clips from lots of different angles and without to much cutting in between - it's better to start with too much video than not enough. If you have multiple cameras then different angles are even better, but don't sweat it.
~Joe
 
I've been monkeying around with Win MM a couple times but one 3 minute HD video is always like six segments when it downloads from the card, is that normal?

I do still have my old Fuji J20 so in a few months I can film some multi-angle mantid porn! LOL :D
 
Could be your camera slicing it up into smaller files. Some still cameras with video features tacked on are designed only to do 30 seconds of recording at a time. I don't know about Window's Moviemaker or whatever it is - all Apple here.
~Joe
 
I still like the Ghost Mantis the best, it's the most wicked looking out of all of em. Mine just molted successfully today, yay!
 
  • #10
Isn't it about time you started posting some pics of your new mantids Larry? Especially since you have all those good cameras!

Seriously, I would love to see the ones you've picked up, you got a Deroplatys (dead leaf) species didn't you? Did you ever find out from the seller if it was D. lobata, dessicata or truncata?
 
  • #11
I didn't want to take pics of the little guys because I thought the flash would freak em out. But my Dead Leaf molted and I took some pics, didn't seem to care about a flash going off in it's face. It's a D. lobata
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  • #12
Wow those pics are nice! Is that guy huge or are you great with the camera (or both)? Usually when I go to take a pic of something pretty small like that (or a dew bubble on a sundew in my case), I'd only get the head in focus or just the tail or a leg and the rest is blurry with a macro setting on my camera.
 
  • #13
This little guy here is about 3/4" though he does look like a giant in the photos ;)
 
  • #14
That's great Larry! Can you come over this weekend and take pics of my critters? :D
 
  • #15
Very cool.

Mantids are among my favorite bugs. I had to do a search for them for sale after I saw this. Looks like there are some dedicated folks breeding lots of unusual species now. Good to see! When I wanted one as a kid I didn't have access to any captive bred ones. I'd get some now but I think the GF would kill me:-(
 
  • #16
That's true, I've been desiring the exotic mantid species since seeing them in nature magazines and Dutch terrarium books many years ago but they were never easily obtainable like they are now with the internet.
 
  • #17
Just bumping up with a few new pics of the purple flower her new colors are getting richer every day after the molt. I could hardly believe her colors yesterday!

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Here's the green flower for comparison:
greenflower1.jpg
 
  • #18
LOL, That thing is just too cool looking. I'm liking the colors on it.
 
  • #19
Wow, that is beautiful! What species is it, I hope it's care is similar to Ghosts.
 
  • #20
The species name is Pseudocreobotra wahlbergii. They seem to change colors depending upon their environment if there is something colorful for them to adapt to, otherwise most times they will be green and white. I'd like to find an orange plant or something and see if I can get one to become orange and white.

They seem to be quite easy, mine are only about 3/4" in size too, can't wait to see her when she's full grown to 2 - 3". I mist the walls and plants of all the insect terrariums everyday, enough to cause a swirling fog of mist droplets but i never spray the mantids directly. If they're real thirsty they wave their arms in the mist and lick the dew off their spines or they will wave their arms in the droplets on the plant leaves. I have an oscillating fan that blows back and forth over the terrarium shelf to dispell heat from the T5s and also supply some slight airflow/air movement into each of the little terrariums. Some insects will refuse to move or eat if there is no air movement. I don't think these mantids fall into that catergory but the fresh air flow certainly doesn't hurt anything and the daily misting and live plants/mosses keeps things from ever getting too dry for them.
 
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