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Ghost mantis

  • Thread starter larry
  • Start date
My male ghostie.
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WOW, very impressive
 
Very diabolical looking, me likes!
 
Looking good, do I see wing stubs back there? If so just one more molt I think and he'll be "ready". :D

Have you any females getting close to adulthood? You can feed the females more and keep them warmer to speed them up a bit and feed the males less and keep em cooler to slow them down a tad.

The egg case my female ghost laid appears to have expanded a tad since I pulled it from her enclosure and put it in it's own little 4" death cube with a screen lid. Hopefully it will hatch in a couple more weeks (4-6 weeks total incubation supposedly). I have this idea that it was laid on 8-5-2010 or pulled out of her enclosure on that date - I didn't make a label for it even though I thought about it.
 
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I took these pics last week. A couple of days ago he molted into an adult. He had complications, his "spine" was all twisted up, had to put him down :( I have no adults but a couple of nymphs left, should be getting an ooth in about a week from Poland. The first ooth he sent was a dud, he's sending another.
 
One out of two males seems to be weak, I lost one of my mature male ghosts and one of my mature male spiny flowers. They were perfect up until adulthood then they seemed to crash for no discernible reason.

Keep your fingers crossed for the doctor seuss looking Horsehead grasshoppers (Proscopia scabra) I have a promising lead so if all goes well I will hatch many more than I need. And these are the true horseheads with metallic blue chrome colored males! :)
 
Nice, don't even know what grasshoppers eat, the giant ones scare me.
 
  • #10
Like the Phasmids (stick & leaf insects) they eat blackberry, raspberry, oak, maple, rose, lilac, Ivy... large soft leaves. The Horseheads do get 6 - 8" but look more like a chrome stick insect than a grasshopper. I just love their silly claymation faces.

You know, the common grasshopper is what caused me to be afraid of insects for the first 20+ years of my life. When I was a toddler one jumped on the front of my Hee Haw overalls and wouldn't get off I can remember screaming and screaming and waving at it and it just hung there probably wondering what the problem was. It wasn't until I got into mounting dried exotic insects in Riker frames about 10 years ago that I overcame my fear by fascination.
 
  • #11
Looks like it should be in an Alien movie.. I want one!! Or two or three..
 
  • #12
Perhaps if I incubated an egg case ontop the microwave the resultant babies would be huge mutants? Imagine 12 - 24" tall ghost mantids - they'd eat our cats! :D
 
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