I ordered an egg pod on the internet once.
Who hasn’t?
I wanted a pet praying mantis, because they are cool. You can’t order one praying mantis though. They sell ’em in little egg clutches of 250-500 little monsters. They send you a thing that looks like a piece of poop and you have to incubate it and collect the newly hatched bugs after a few days. People order them not so much as pets, but for pest control. It’s up for debate whether or not they are useful for this purpose, because they just eat any other insect they can catch. They don’t necssarily catch problem bugs.
So I was probably drunk, and I ordered some praying mantises. They arrived in a little brown bag. I’ve done similar things before; I have owned several venus flytraps because I love the idea of a predatory plant. I once sat a flytrap outside on my porch and watched a fly go into his little chomper mouth and get closed in on and it was beautiful to me. Dumbass fly touched both trigger hairs and it was all over. My chomper plant consumed him.
The acorn clutch of mantis babies arrived in the mail. I stuck it in a styrofoam cooler. I don’t know. They need several days of a constant temperature to actually hatch.
I came home from work each day and checked on my little guys. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. One day I opened it up and that shitty styrofoam cooler was brimming with life. Dozens of mantises arrayed all over the interior of the thing. “Oh shit,” said I, “We’ve got mantises.”
I grabbed three of them with my little pincher fingers, trying to be as gentle as possible. I put them in a terrarium. They were so small. Imagine the intricate architecture of a mantis’s body, but like one centimeter long. Tough to pinch them lightly enough to put them in a tank. The rest of the hatcherlings were going to be released into the wild. I was going to introduce this species to the south side of Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Took the shitty styrofoam cooler outside, took the lid off and tipped it on its side. I watched the mantises walk to the edge, stop, and consider their situation, and then jump off into the grass. I swear to God. They were intelligent. They considered the jump. Some of them even tipped their head a bit, like they were thinking.
I released like 500 mantises into the Eau Claire area. If this is a crime, well, I didn’t actually. (But really I did)
My terrarium mantises died almost right away. I feel kinda bad about that, but I couldn’t catch prey small enough for them. I grabbed a couple of really tiny ants and threw them in there, but those ants were about as big as them. I don’t know what baby mantises hunt. I encouraged my pet mantises to attack those little bitch ants, but they just looked at them with their blank expression. Maybe man isn’t meant to have these things as pets, I don’t know. Should I have caught some fuckin’ aphids for them to eat or something?
I had imagined the hundreds of mantises would rule the school in southern Eau Claire. I never saw one again. Those smart little bugs just disappeared completely after I set them free. However
My friend, Hakey, said he saw a tiny little praying mantis in his kitchen. This was a few months after I got my boys. It was standing with its arms spread wide. They are not native here. It may have been one of mine. Maybe it grabbed onto his pantleg when he was leaving my house or something. I dunno. These are a great scythe-arm critter. They are an intelligent bug. Isn’t that interesting?
Sometimes an idea sparkles. A bug eats another bug. It’s really pretty.
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