Describe the difference between a praying mantis and a grasshopper please?
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silky1 (
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August 31st, 2010
The body characteristics and such.
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According to Wikipedia: ”grasshoppers prefer to eat grasses, leaves and cereal crops. Some will tend to eat from a single host plant, while others will eat from a variety of sources throughout the day.”
and
”Mantises are exclusively predatory. Insects form the primary diet, but larger species have been known to prey on small lizards, frogs, birds, snakes, fish and even rodents; they will prey upon any species small enough to successfully capture and devour. Most species of mantis are known to engage in cannibalism.”
Well i’m no expert, far from it, but the praying mantis always strikes me as an evil vicious killing machine. Whereas the humble grasshopper is more of a nuisance or a pest.
Their bodies are somewhat similar because they are both insects. They both have three body segments: head, thorax, and abdomen. They both have six legs and, when they reach maturity, they have wings. They both hatch from eggs looking very similar to the adult form, just much smaller. They both shed their skin as they grow.
The biggest differences would be in their specialized parts. Grasshoppers have those big back legs for jumping and mouth parts for eating plants, as they are mainly herbivores. Mantids have specialized front legs for grasping and hanging onto their prey and mouths designed to eat other insects. Mantids are also the only insects that can turn their heads.
The praying mantis will eat the grasshopper.
I’m with @ucme. A praying mantis looks like a robotic death machine from another world.
Praying mantis’ are agressive and they spit this stuff at you, I hate them. Grasshoppers never give me any problems.
@Randy tha was hilarious. I thought for sure the last pm ws going to be some predatory female who “eats her mate” after copulation. Naga mention any names.
@Trillian Hahahaha! I wish I would have thought of that! That would have been way better!
Praying Manti are going to Heaven. Grasshoppers will burn in Hell.
@Mom2BDec2010 A praying mantis can spit? I’ve never seen that. My kids have caught them and kept them (briefly) as pets, but we’ve never seen one spit. They can bite if they feel threatened. Grasshoppers, on the other hand, make this dark brown “spit” when the kids catch them. It stains their hands and looks disgusting.
We were at a local park yesterday and kept seeing these strange, large bugs flying around. My son was able to catch one, and it turned out to be a mantis. We’d never seen them flying around like that. One flew up and landed on my leg. They look like fairies when they’re flying. They are also great to keep in your garden because they will eat anything they can catch. We usually order an mantis egg case and, when it hatches, let the babies go in our garden. They are much cooler than grasshoppers!
@MissAusten According to a cartoon I saw, grasshoppers use chewing tobacco.
I used to hear it was illegal in NJ to kill a praying mantis, but that isn’t true.
@mrentropy There are a lot of urban legends about it being illegal to kill a praying mantis. As a kid in Indiana, I was always told there was a $50 fine for killing one. I looked it up a couple of years ago, and there has never been such a law in any state.
This is where I go for reference when I use insects in my artwork.You can make visual comparisons.
http://godofinsects.com/
@mrentropy We were told in Virginia that it was illegal to destroy a praying mantis egg sac. It kept the neighborhood boys from smashing them with a hammer. Like @MissAusten , I can’t locate any record of it,
@MissAusten & @Pied_Pfeffer Yeah, it’s one of those things that pop up all over the country yet was never true. Go figure. I guess it worked to stop indiscriminate killing of the critters, though.
Thanks to info supplied by @phoebusg at the top, mantises and grasshoppers are both insects but belong to different orders. Because mantises belong to order (or super-order) Dictyoptera while grasshoppers belong to Orthoptera, they are not closely related.
Mantises are related to termites and cockroaches (W).
Grasshoppers are related to crickets and katydids (W)
@robmandu: “The praying mantis will eat the grasshopper.” Maybe. But when I collected insects as a kid I found the grasshoppers would eat practically any other bugs in the jar.
@MissAusten -Yes,I like it very much and might order a specimen or two :)
Your son must be a bug guy :)
Here’s a photo I took this afternoon of my son and a praying mantis we found in our garden. This one is an adult, and probably female from its large size and the number of segments I could see on its abdomen.
Yes, my son is a bug guy!
@Trillian He’s pretending to be freaked out. He tried to get it to climb on his head, but it flew back to my basil plants where it had been stalking bees.
Cool. I would have been… uncomfortable, but I had a bad dream about a mantis once, and I’ve never forgotten it.
Sweet looking little guy, btw.
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