And did you know that...

a large religion bit into my finger. they really grab hard. I think most of the big tropics are bigger and grabbing worse.
The fact is that the praying mantis does not naturally hang from the plastic (ngami, although it does not cling to anything )

My mantis crawled on the inside of a plastic five-liter tank almost without problems, although the other three who lived in such cages did not have such climbing abilities. But on the wallpaper and window frames, everyone was deftly crawling, apparently, even large protrusions were enough for them to catch on. It's another matter if they could do it with the loot when the grabbers are busy.

This post was edited by wise snake - 09/10/2009 14: 17

the weight of even a small bird is like a collibri for an ogogo insect.. But maybe they have enough abilities, ai dontou)

A bird, and even more so a hummingbird, is a light prey, although it is bulky. A large rhinoceros beetle can hardly weigh less.

It is possible that this genus of praying mantis has increased stickiness. So, usually ground beetles can not run on vertical glass. But the genus Demetrias-easily.

This post was edited by omar - 09/10/2009 16: 12

Somewhat off topic, since it's not about insects, but still about oddities or food features.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/sep...ts-hunting-bats
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1774...bats-heads.html

Did you know that…
in SASS (California) lives a fly that feeds on ... oil (not an imago, of course, but a larva)? Someone will say: "Yes, pindos lie that 2... (send bytes to the soap). They were also on the Moon, like, and the "star-striped" (there, on the Moon) proudly flew in the wind (this is in airless space) (NASA, however, removed all these dumb photos from its website, and about the lunar soil – several tons, allegedly brought from Moon, it became known that he was "kidnapped")". But, in this case, the fly was described by a typical Frenchman and published, all the way in Canada; Dob (r) Zhansky himself "legalized" it with his mention in one of the last articles. For more than 100 years (since the discovery), articles about it-with gulkin ... (beak).
In Russian, I know only 2 articles (both in the" popular natural history magazine ""Nature") about this fly. These publications refer to the "romantic" time (1930s) when the SSR'ii offered to extract rubber (which had no sources of its own) from ... domestic insects (!!). The message about the "magic" fly probably caused the party activists to increase their hatred, which was heavily mixed with envy, for the class enemy: "the Pindos bourgeoisie is lucky , they can even extract oil from flies" ...
And someone, probably, remembering the speech of David Burliuk (1913):
Everyone is young, young, young,
With a hell of a hunger in their stomachs. <...>
We will eat stones, herbs,
Sweetness, bitterness and poisons,
We will eat emptiness,
Depth and height,
Birds, animals, monsters, fish,
Wind, clay, salt and swell! <...>
Everything that we meet on the way
Can be used as food for us. -
I took this speech literally. Then (in the 30s), however, "what to eat" was more important than gasoline, and a fly that consumes oil created a precedent: if flies eat, then people will (here, then we will live-oh!). "...The study of the biology of this <...> fly takes the question to much broader areas, and moreover of great importance in practice. ... The study of the method of nutrition can give a lot to resolve issues related <...> to the production of oil products suitable for human consumption" (Nature. 1934. No. 10, p. 81). "Oil contains organic acids that are closely chemically related to the acids of natural fats. Until recently, only one extravagant fly, which lives in oil-bearing areas and colonizes oil with its larvae, had a keen interest in them. The larvae hatch in oil and spend their lives in it, even turning into flies, feeding on petroleum acids. Man neglected this component of oil" (Khodakov Yu. V. The laboratory competes with nature, Moscow, 1933, p. 100). They didn't know about the oil reserves in Siberia yet… And then, well, exactly, today everyone would go with purple (like nObama's lips) faces…

This post was edited by Bolivar - 03/22/2010 16: 54

These are ephydrides, beregovushki. There are quite a lot of articles on the types of them that live in oil. Interestingly, living in oil, they do not eat it. They eat various trapped garbage, trapped insects.

These are ephydrides, beregovushki. There are quite a lot of articles on the types of them that live in oil. Interestingly, living in oil, they do not eat it. They eat various trapped garbage, stuck insects.

Indeed, they are shorebirds (Ephydridae), more precisely, Psilopa (Helomyza) petrolei.
It is enough to "Google" about Psyloma (variant: Helaeomyia petrolei) to make sure that there is complete uncertainty with the nutrition of this "oil" fly. Moreover, the question of whether they "eat" only "various trapped garbage, trapped insects" or, nevertheless, oil, has been debated for almost a hundred years. In the 1930s, W. H. Thorpe, as it seemed to him, established that in the absence of corpses, not a single larva will survive to the imago stage. But (!) at the same time, he emphasizes that from his experiments it is impossible (emphasis added by me – Yu.) to conclude that larvae are not capable of obtaining any nutrients from oil themselves. On the contrary, they "devour" oil and "assimilate" it (see: Thorpe W. H. Petroleum Bacteria and the Nutrition of Psilopa petrolei / / Nature. 1932. No. 130. P. 437; see also: Thorpe W. H. The Biology of the Petroleum Fly, Psilopa petrolei / / Transactions Entomol. Soc. London. 1930. Vol. 78. P. 331-344).
As for the number of articles about this fly, the authors, indeed, are "quite a lot" (for one article)... but articles ? An abstract of an article by six authors that fits on the same six pages of the journal "Applied and Environmental Microbiology" 1999 is available on the vlekhkuyu network. What is the article about? have you read it ? - (well, at least Abstract) - about the fact that these flies "eat various trapped garbage, stuck insects"? "Nooooo!"

... that boxes of Brazilian bananas can sometimes contain Brazilian wandering spiders-Phoneutria fera. I think it would be superfluous to mention their poison... Cooks, be careful in the kitchen!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england...set/4489033.stm

This post was edited by Dr. Niko - 02.06.2010 21: 48