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Mickey Mantis: Gardener's Friend, Insects' Enemy

© Keith Muraoka

I have a friend in my garden this summer and his name is Mickey Mantis. Mickey is an insect-catching praying mantis. I named him after another Mickey, one known more for his ball-catching and home run-hitting abilities with the Yankees.

My Mickey is also surrounded by "teammates" who look very similar. You know what they say, you can't tell the players without a scorecard. Mickey's "team" includes a vast number of other praying mantids -- all of whom were hatched from a mantid egg case I purchased from a local nursery.

I must admit I was a little skeptical about hatching my own mantids. I've bought live ladybugs before, and they all flew off to purge themselves with aphids from my neighbors' gardens. Even were my mantids to hatch as advertised, who was to say they wouldn't follow the ladybugs' path to insect happiness?

I hung the cocoon-like egg case on a rose bush and proceeded to forget about them. It wasn't until a month or so later that I noticed hundreds of soft, wingless creatures about a half-inch-long wiggling out of the egg case. They hung motionless from the silken threads until dry, then disappeared into the surrounding shrubs.

I didn't see the mantids again until one day after I was going through my normal after-work watering. Upon spraying some groundcover, out hopped several green, grasshopper-like mantids. In watering the citrus, I detected a few more. Moving on to the roses, the mantids suddenly began appearing like magic -- attempting to move away from the unwelcome shower.

It was then that I realized that -- unlike the fly-away-home ladybugs -- each mantid that survived the hatching had selected his own little territory to hang out. Mickey happened to be a little larger than the others and stood out because he picked a certian wet corner of my verbena groundcover to live. That corner is always soaked due to a small leak in an underground sprinkler pipe that I've failed to repair. Maybe Mickey has a little frog in him.

Whatever the case, Mickey and his "team" -- I call them the Minnesota Mantids -- began to clean my garden of insects. Everything from aphids to houseflies, crickets and tomato hornworms became a gourmet meal. A single mantid will devour as many as 700 insects in its short lifespan, often eating insects quite a bit larger than itself.

I've never thought of myself as a masochist, but I get great pleasure in watching the mantids work. It's amazing to see Mickey, a three-inch mantid, take on a six-inch tomato hornworm. Mickey will hold his bristly prey between his forelegs and eat it like a piece of corn.