What kind of mantis is it?
Its very thin legs carry leaf-shaped lobes, and the whole body looks like a dry leaf or twig.
How to identify it
- The pronotum is very thin and long and the abdomen is wide, so from above it's shaped like a violin.
- Leaf-like lobes on thin legs.
- Black and pink pattern inside the front legs.
Size comparison
Wandering violin mantisUp to 110 mm
₩500 coin (diameter)26.5 mm
02468101214cm
Body length runs from the head to the tip of the abdomen, using the maximum of the larger sex. The bars only show relative size, so they don't match real size on screen.
Look-alikes
- Very thin, long pronotum
- Wide abdomen: violin-shaped from above
- Leaf-like lobes on thin legs
- Black and pink pattern inside the front legs
- Red, blue, purple, white, and black pattern inside the front legs
- Cone-shaped crest on the head
- Leaf-like lobes on the legs and abdomen
Versus the devil's flower mantis: the devil's flower mantis, in the same family, has red and blue markings inside its front legs and lives in East Africa.
Range
It lives in hot, dry regions of southern India and Sri Lanka.
Behavior
It sways back and forth like a twig in the wind.
It snatches flying insects out of the air.
Threatened adults raise their front legs to show the black and pink pattern.
Cannibalism within the species is uncommon, so keepers sometimes house several together.