Ravenous no more!

I finally found food for my 6-legged carnivore babies! Now I can stop having nightmares about them dying of starvation. Whew.

Turns out, the pinhead crickets were the winner. My first few crickets were just too big last time. I talked to the pet store guy (the last pet store in town to have anything even CLOSE to small enough for these mantids) and he worked really hard to get 30 of the very teeniest crickets out of their cricket enclosure. Truly small. Smaller than ants. Then he showed me what I would need for housing and feeding the crickets. Live food is a delight in and of itself. I have to keep the crickets happy and healthy for them to be good food for the mantids.

*sigh*

So, $1.80 in crickets and $8 in cricket supplies later, we are now the proud owners of a praying mantis habitat AND a cricket habitat. Both are thriving.

I guess my little farm now includes three kinds of livestock.

Pinhead cricket habitat. See those leggy little dark spots under the toilet paper roll?

Mantid habitat, with a few crickets remaining. Crumpled wet napkin (for water), ring of window screening (for climbing on), and pencil for scale. The little lines are mantids and the little dots are crickets.

A close up of the mantid habitat. I count 6 mantids and 1 cricket.

When I dumped those first few crickets in, I literally saw praying mantis heads turn in eager interest. Did they hear them? Feel their movements? Whatever it was, this time was different from all the other food attempts, and the mantids were clearly paying attention. They crept up slowly and watched the crickets walking around. One cricket got just close enough to a hungry mantis and the mantis pounced faster than I could see. End of the road for cricket #1. Then another mantis found a meal. And another one. I was convinced at that moment that the crickets would work. I could finally breathe.

*whew*

How does a mantis eat a cricket? Well, these guys appear to eat them from the abdomen up in 10 minutes or so. Sometimes they eat the cricket's head, sometimes they leave it. It's hard for me to tell which mantids have eaten and which haven't. I'm thinking I'll just make sure there are 5-10 crickets roaming around in there at all times. Let the mantids control their own feeding regimen.

How soon will they outgrow their enclosure?

How big will they get before it's warm enough to put them outside?

Worries for another day. Right now, I'm just celebrating the fact that they probably won't starve to death :)