Thistle While You Work

What am I looking at?

This is the head and upper thorax of a thistle mantis (Blepharopsis mendica). You can see its characteristic striped eyes (1), its antennae (2), its large claw-like front legs (3), and the top section of its folded wings (4). Long antennae and prominent ocelli, or simple eyes, are characteristic traits of males of this species. Click on the right arrow to see more views of this mantis – including, in the last image, at the young nymph stage.

Biology in the background

The thistle mantis, also called the Egyptian flower mantis or the Arab mantis, lives across North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, southern Asia, and the Canary Islands. Like other mantis species, they are insectivorous and are especially good at ambushing and catching flying insects. Their green, white, and brown coloration makes them well suited for hiding among the leaves, needles, and spiny branches of the desert and scrub plants they prefer to inhabit. Unlike some other mantis species, they are not very aggressive toward conspecifics (members of the same species) and prefer to take on smaller prey rather than attempting to tackle larger meals.

The black dots you see in many photographs of mantises and other similar insects are called pseudopupils. They seem to follow you around and give the impression that the insect is looking straight at you.

Their compound eyes are made of hundreds, even thousands, of facets. Each of them is an elongated, slightly conical tube with a double lens on one end and dark-pigmented, light-sensitive receptor cells on the other end. The walls of the om­matidia, as these tubes are called, are opaque. Ommatidia are aligned along the radiuses of the dome-shaped eyes, so when you look into a mantis’s eyes, you can see the dark bottoms of some of the tubes. An image of two dark points, or dots, against a brighter back­ground is a strong signal generally associated with eyes throughout the animal kingdom. Thus the mantis’s pseudopupils could alarm potential prey, making it prudent to hide them. The vertical or swirly bright and dark stripes covering the eyes of many mantis species may well serve this purpose.

Three ocelli are arranged in a triangle between this mantis’s antennae. It has been shown that ocelli are used by flying insects in navigation, helping them correct their body position with respect to the horizon. As in many other mantis species, thistle mantis females are flightless, while males can fly, albeit for relatively short distances. That could explain why the males’ ocelli are significantly larger than those of females.

A thistle mantis can grow up to 6 centimeters long, or roughly three times the size of a human thumbnail.

Technique

These images were created using macrophotography.