The common mantis found in North America is not poisonous and does not sting. A mantis will bite if you hold it and annoy it, but it can’t hurt you unless you have very thin skin. An average adult would only feel a pinch without any other effect. However, I did receive an e-mail about a little girl who apparently had an allergic reaction to a mantis bite and needed medical attention.

Don’t try to pickup a mantis. They are very sensitive and seem to hate being squeezed or touched. Just let it walk onto you hand or arm. You can encourage this by putting your finger in front of a mantis and then move under it, but if it doesn’t want to get on your hand then there’s not much you can do about it. It’s all worth the effort when you have a mantis walk on your arm and have it start to preen itself after it had found a comfortable perch.

No it’s not tracking you. A mantis has compound eyes and can’t move it’s eyes like us. That’s why they swivel their heads when they want to get a different perspective. What’s happening to you is that as you move around you’re actually looking down into different facets of the compound eyes and seeing the dark retina at the bottom of the mantis's eyes. A dragon fly’s eye will do the same. Although your mantis is not tracking you with its eyes, I’m pretty sure that it’s looking at you and everything around it at the same time.

If you don’t want to raise the mantises, then just vacuum them up and throw them out. Life is rough sometimes, especially if you’re not on top of the food chain. It’s a good thing the common mantis is not endangered

If you found my web page then you should have no trouble finding a source for mantis eggs online, but if you do need help then I recommend http://www.Garden.com or http://www.planetnatural.com/beneficialinsects1.html you might still have to scroll around a bit to find the egg cases.

No, you don’t have to spray the egg cases daily. Just put the egg cases on a branch in your mantis habitat, and keep the humidity high by spraying around the egg case often (a few time per week). Water or rain will not damage the egg case as long as you don’t immerse it in water.

You have to decide whether you can raise all the young mantises, or to set some of them free. If you already decided to raise them then you better get them some food soon. You’re in good shape if you have access to a garden full of bugs, but it’s still a chore collecting bugs everyday. My recommendation is to buy some flightless fruit fly cultures. These flies are easy to culture and easy to handle, and they are the ideal food for young mantises. I’m told that Petsmart carries these flies. I got mine cultures from Edsflymeat.com (I’m not associated with them in any way. I just like their fly cultures). Read my log and the caresheet carefully. You should be able to get all the information you need to raise your mantis there. Check out all the links including the Cricket caresheet. (You’ll have to keep crickets too, if you want to raise mantises)

An ideal home for a mantis in captivity would be a large aquarium with a lot of branches in it. The humidity should be high, and the temperature should be keep in a stable range of 70 to 90F. The best thing to do is to have a light bulb mounted at one end of the tank (see my pictures). There should also be a constant supply of live food in the tank, because the mantis will hunt and eat around the clock. Actually, the ideal home for a mantis would be a green house full of plants, aphids, and flies (thank you Naida from Nevada for suggesting this idea).

Yes the eggs will hatch. Mantises are parthenogenic (or parthenogenetic), which means that they don’t have to mate to produce fertile eggs. However, unferilized eggs will all hatch into females. I’m just surprised that they haven’t taken over the world with such a cleaver reproductive strategy.