HORROR IS A PRAYING MANTIS
Rex Burress
My son Ben is an astronomer/scientist at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland, California. He is also a horror fan!
Affiliated with the preciseness of astronomy and with the effort to find non-fictional facts of the universe through scientific research, horror movies would seem contradictory. However, the human mind can support a duo role of truth and fiction, as apparent in a child's ability to quickly switch from fact to fairytales. Honest nature interpretation can also drift into fiction without conflict, as shown by Naturalist Thornton Burgess' published “Little Bedtime Stories of Peter Rabbit and the Brier Patch.”
A recent facebook flick stated, “If you're lonely, watch a horror show; you won't be alone anymore.” I might add, “If you want to witness horror, consider the Praying Mantis!” This voracious insect will eat anything it can catch--including mice and small lizards--and is not reluctant to eat a live katydid from the rear end up!
Even though the name “praying mantis” reflects the way they clasp the formidable front legs together in readiness to strike and grasp prey, perhaps “preying” mantis would suffice. Whatever the common name, Mantids of the insect suborder Mantodea, are real horrors to other insects, and will even eat their own kind. The entire creature with triangular head and bulging eyes gives the appearance of being an alien from some other world. The goggled head perched on a long slender neck makes it look like some kind of diabolical robot, and if the mantis was human-sized, what a horror it would be!
On top of those atrocities, the female mantis is so obsessed with eating that she sometimes beheads the male while in the process of mating, and the body-controlled sexual organs actually thrust more sperm into her receptacle. Then she finishes eating her lover, unless he can escape, but a mantis without a head is like a train without an engine. The male should give up the fool's game and stay clear of “the lady's pheromone love potion,” but can mantises and man give up sex?
Out of this horror show, the female lays a cluster of eggs called an Ootheca involving encasement in individual chambers plastered onto the stem of a plant. After laying she dies. There's such a pod in my garden right now, adhered to a rogue pistache seedling stem. It looks like a rippled butterfly chrysalis, but inside no larvae-to-pupa is transforming into an adult--it's straight from the egg to infant-nymph mantis, and then it's eat, eat, eat, growing through several molts to reach adulthood. But in a process called diapause, tthe autumn egg doesn't hatch until warm springtime...unless you take the cluster inside your house! Don't!
For a number of years I would stop on highway 113 at Sutters Bypass in winter where there was always some kind of photogenic wildlife. Mantises hid in the weeds, and once I photographed a female laying “white-rice” eggs and attaching them together on the stem, her hope for the future of her kind.
I am reminded that once I was leading a nature walk along the river, and facing the audience I reached behind me to get a sample of fennel for the kids to smell. Unknown to me, a mantis was hiding in the green foliage and it was included in the handful! “Look at him; he can grab a mantis without looking,” my impressed audience gasped. I never let on that I was as surprised as them! It didn't bite although it clasped so hard it made pinpricks on my finger! Most of the Oroville mantids are introduced European Mantises.
“The Insect World's” page has depicted some of the 2400 species of exotic mantids, and the variety of complex mimic designs is remarkable. Some species imitate flower blossoms to lure victims in a mode called aggressive mimicry, and generally they are all of an alien appearance. In Ancient Greece, mantises were considered supernatural. Siberian fossils of mantids date back to 135 million years.
“From whence arrived the praying mantis?/From outer space, or lost Atlantis?/
Glimpse the grin, green metal mug/It masks the pseudo-saintly bug,/Orthopterous, also carnivorous,/
And faintly whisper, 'Lord deliver us.'”--Ogden Nash