The praying mantis is a beautiful critter… id quod visum placet – as Aquinas put it – that which seen pleases – and more often than not, in spheres of both the animate and inanimate, this beauty comes at a price, a curse inflicted upon self or others… as Frost surmised… everything beautiful, that’s truly beautiful, is dangerous…
The world of arthropods lays testament to this fact… a world of unceasing urgency and activity that mostly escapes the naked eye, ‘tis a hubbub of sound and colour that gains in sheer numbers whatever it loses in size… a microcosm greater than the sum of its parts, even the tiniest bit of life aligned perfectly, to the songs of the seasons or the enormity of the cosmos…
Such was trail of thought I chewed upon watching this particular mantis, ironically, its prey to thank, for otherwise I’d never have seen through the camouflage… there was a Lychee shield bug I’d stalked a couple of weeks back and seeing another, started creeping up towards it when I noticed its hindsight looking rather pointed…
Peering in on the underside of the shrubbery, the scenario revealed itself, the bug crushed haplessly in the unforgiving forearms of a praying mantis, which was completely invisible to me a moment back… ‘twas too thorny to sit and watch the drama unfold, so on the haunches it had to be, with that eerie feeling of being completely unaware how many of its brethren surrounded me in these bushes…
‘Tis a fascinating world, that of the mantis, a member or the female-eat-male-after-mating club (all for the progenies, they’d say), masters of camouflage, adept hunters with diet ranging from small flies to hummingbirds, lizards and frogs… from being revered in ancient cultures as gods and necromancers to becoming popular modern day pets, their lore keeps evolving…
This particular one was a species from the Hierodula genus, a green body with white and yellow accents making it nearly impossible to distinguish from the vegetation, if not for the prominent forelegs, it could easily be mistaken for a grasshopper… the young mimic ants to avoid predators, and adults have a yellow white patch on the upper body to bluff them, an example to deimatic behaviour… and then there are those unique characteristics like only one ear, that too in the belly (or none), ability to detect ultrasound and evade bats…
Bit by bit the mantis dismembered and devoured the bug – which was alive and kicking about in futility, being impaled by those pincers – in between giving me annoyed stares with those large compound eyes, small flies mischievously stole bits and pieces from its mouth… finishing the meal leisurely in around twenty minutes, it stretched around for a bit, before I decided that this was enough invasion of privacy and took its leave…
Musings on a mantis, Hierodula coarctata, Noida, Uttar Pradesh
