Cute critters

Tiny juvenile praying mantis on my knuckle

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.

Mantis head on arm crop

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.

Young praying mantis roaming around 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.

Mantis licking crop wide

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.

Posted by

mccnmatt

Posted on

October 10, 2014

Posted under

anthropocene, Anthropomorphism, Backyard birds, Seasons

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Going cuckoo

You’re suddenly awake. It’s very very early in the morning. There’s an loud, insistent two-note call right outside your bedroom window. It goes on and on and on, each time inching up in pitch, getting more and more desperate until it’s pretty much a hysterical squeak. Just when you think the bird’s going to start outright screaming or explode, abruptly it stops. You settle down in bed. And then it starts again.

Or it’s the middle of the night. Somewhere in the darkness, there seems to be a huge, angry and deeply confused seagull, belligerently squawking in disgruntlement and disgust: “Where the hell’s the beach??! And where are my chips!!!?”

It’s spring and they’re back. Koels with their plaintively annoying round-the-clock cries, and channel billed cuckoos, raging at midnight (and during the day as well).

I heard my first koel, bang on time, the day after the vernal equinox; a raucous channel billed cuckoo interrupted one of my classes a few days before. They’ve flown in from the north in time for the breeding season. Sydney: it’s officially spring.

Whining teenaged koel begging for attention and grub

Despite their loud voices I have only ever eyeballed koels a couple of times. On both occasions it was a whining juvenile that got my attention. Down the bottom of the garden a year or two, I watched a great galumphing teenager begging for takeaway from a motherly if diminutive wattlebird. We’re still working on installing LBB (little brown bird) habitat around here. In the meantime wattlebirds rule the roost, along with magpies, kookaburras, rainbow lorikeets, cockies, brush turkeys – the usual self-confident generalists and anthropophiles (is that even a word?). Which suits the koels fine, since red wattlebirds seem to make great parents.

Channel billed cuckoos prefer currawongs and occasionally magpies as babysitters, and since a mob of maggies has been hanging out at our place over the winter, I wonder if we might get an in-situ “fig hawks” or two as well. My dad spotted a mega-cuckoo at the top of the drive last weekend, so it just might happen. Surprisingly, considering its deafening cries and outlandish hornbird-esque appearance, no-one knows much about what the channel billed cuckoos get up to in their spare time. So, go, backyard birdwatchers, go! Do that citizen science thing!

My one and only picture of a channel billed cuckoo

For all the mystery, it seems these guys, like the brown cuckoo doves, cooing outside the kitchen window in a more decorous and paradigmatically cuckooish way, are some of the winners of the anthropocene. They like us and our tasty fruit-bearing trees. And they favour the parenting style of the other birds that enjoy the buffet. Currawongs have come down from the mountains in the last forty years to snack on Sydney’s privet and lantana, and the visiting cuckoos are pretty happy about it.

Brown cuckoo dove

Brown cuckoo dove wondering “What’s the annoying clicking noise?”

Reflecting on how much these birds seem to enjoy our company, I’m tempted by a “humans-as-brood-parasites” line of thinking. Begging for food from our animal compatriots, all the while chucking their babies out of the nest. Terminating the blood lines of the things that came before us in a flash and replacing them with more and more of our own offspring. Bigger, noisier and more devious than the critters that feed us and house us.

But let’s not go there. It’s a nasty thought, and whatever we might say about humans, cuckoos just aren’t that bad.