What kind of mantis is it?
Individuals can be brown, gray, or green, and nymphs sometimes change color at molting to match their surroundings. The female's wings cover only about 3/4 of the abdomen.
How to identify it
- Females have short wings that don't cover the abdomen tip.
- The body is tan to gray-brown; a green form exists too.
Size comparison
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
- Females have short wings that don't cover the abdomen tip
- Tan to gray-brown body (green form exists too)
- Membrane between front-leg bases is yellow (flip it over)
- Hindwing base dark brown with smoky blotches
- Long, thick pronotum
- 14–20 white spines on the front coxa
Versus the Chinese mantis: the Chinese mantis, which was introduced to North America and spread, is much bigger (up to about 10 cm), and its wings cover the whole abdomen.
Range
It's common at forest edges and in grassland, especially around flowering plants, and is often seen in gardens.
Behavior
An ambush hunter. In temperate regions all the adults die in winter, and the species overwinters as eggs in egg cases.
Females sometimes eat males during mating, but this is mostly seen in starved lab animals.
Fun facts
- The South Carolina legislature named it the state insect in 1988.
- It eats many pests, but it also eats helpful animals such as pollinators and spiders without discriminating.
We couldn't confirm the original source of the figure "cannibalism in about 25% of matings," so we left it out.