Somehow International Women’s Day seems like a good time to post about this tiny praying mantis, who visited us last week.  So very very cute.

Australia has 118 varieties of mantis – well that’s the ones we know about anyway – new insect species are being discovered all the time. The crowdsourced wisdom of the Australian amateur entymology Facebook page suggests that this one is a snake mantid Kongobatha diademata, a species that not often spotted, though it’s probably around more than we think. It’s hard to see because even the adults are quite small – only two or two and a half centimetres long.  This youngster isn’t even as small as young snake mantids get.  The first instars when they hatch out with 20 or so siblings from their ootheca, or egg case, are pale – almost transparent.  So this nymph as already shed its skin at least once.  Imagine how tiny that discarded exoskeleton would be!  Unbelievably cute – something for a cabinet of curiosities in a dollhouse.

I’m not sure that snake mantids indulge in sexual cannibalism.  I definitely need to spend more time exploring the CSIRO’s online insect resources to get genned up on this kind of thing.  But without being in any way definitive about it, it is possible this exceedingly cute and tiny creature is a female that will grow up to bite off the head of her mate mid-coitus.  Especially if she’s feeling a bit hungry.  Don’t mate with the hungry ones, fellas (apparently they try quite hard not to)!

Despite (or perhaps because) of such assertiveness, praying mantises are apparently the most popular insect pet.  Meeting this one, you can really see why.  But mantises belong in the same group – or “superorder” – dichtyoptera – as termites and cockroaches.  Equally convenient to find around the house and garden but not cute enough, it seems, to keep as pets.

Maybe it’s these big eyes that – along with a small nose and mouth, short limbs, and smallness in general, being child-like, unthreatening, helpless and sometimes a bit podgy – make something cute. Cockroaches tick some of those boxes but obviously not quite enough. This miniscule mantid instar, on the other hand, still too young to have wings, looks like a tiny green pony, running through the waving fields of hair on my forearm.

Given reports of catastrophic declines in insect numbers in the industrialised world over the last thirty years, maybe we need to start cultivating the same feeling of fondness for other insects as I felt about this lovely little mantid after it had capered around on my person for half an hour or so.

Ed Yong, assessing recent claims of an insect apocalypse, observes the mindboggling diversity of the insect world, and the resilience that might spring from that sheer variety. “There are more species of ladybugs than mammals, of ants than birds, of weevils than fish” he rightly marvels.  Surely amongst all these critters, we can find more to love and less to be creeped out by.

On the other hand, there’s something fundamentally rude about the word “cute”, isn’t there?  You’re not cute if you’re even a tiny bit scary.  If you have might just bite someone’s head off.  Or maybe you can still be cute, as long as you’re biting someone else’s head off?

Either way maybe it’s not more cuteness we need to improve things between humans and the insect world, but more r.e.s.p.e.c.t.

References

Laforteza, Elaine (2014) “Cute-ifying disability: Lil Bub, the Celebrity Cat m/c journal 17(2)

Prokop, Pavol and Maxwell, Michael R. (2016) “Female predatory response to conspecific males and heterospecific prey in the praying mantis Mantis religiosa: evidence
for discrimination of conspecific males” Journal of Ethology 34:139–14

Svenson, Gavin (2007) The origins, evolution and phylogeny of praying mantises (Dichtyoptera – Mantodea) PhD thesis, Brigham Young University.