The Insane Biology of: The Praying Mantis - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

Subtitles section Play video

This video is brought to you by Nebula, where you can watch the extended interviews from this video and other behind-the-scenes real science content.
When you observe a praying mantis, its swiveling head and its following eyes give a creepy sense that you are being watched.
Before making this video, I knew praying mantises were kinda cool and kinda creepy.
When I found one while camping in Texas, I made my boyfriend, now husband, help me take pictures of it for like an hour.
Literally an hour before I was going to export this video, by an amazing coincidence, I found one patrolling my zucchini plants.
For being such a small insect, its behavior was rather bold.
It climbed on me, hopped on my phone, and stared deep into my soul.
I freaking love these bugs.
I love the way that they seem so aware of their surroundings.
I've always known they had this penetrating gaze and amazing raptorial claws.
What I didn't know is that they eat birds.
And frogs.
And they seem to do it more than we ever realized.
This little fact only feeds into what is their already creepy reputation.
If you know anything about praying mantids, you probably know that the females eat the males after mating.
And because of this and their unsettling gaze, many people straight up hate praying mantids or think that they're evil.
Just look at the comments of the video of the praying mantis eating the hummingbird.
But even though they do eat birds and they do eat their boyfriends, praying mantids are so much more than creepy little freaks.
Their hunting style, while sometimes shocking, is incredibly impressive.
With no venom and no stinger.
How is it possible that this relatively small invertebrate takes down things much bigger than itself?
And on top of this, some praying mantises take their ambush hunting to the next level, operating under an incredible disguise.
And unlike many other insect predators who use chemoreception and mechanoreception for hunting, the praying mantis finds its prey visually.
And their eyes are some of the most sophisticated in the insect world.
They are the only known insect to see in 3D.
Their vision is so unique and so powerful that researchers think it could hold the answer to computer vision in certain small robots.
And when it comes to eating their boyfriends, it's not just because they're ruthless man-haters.
They have a pretty compelling reason for this unusual behavior.
Praying mantises are so incredible, researchers put them in a category of their own among insects, comparing them more closely to vertebrates than their insect counterparts.
There is nothing else like them.
How are praying mantises able to kill prey so much larger than they are?
What makes them such accurate assassins?
And why do they eat their boyfriends?
When you think of a praying mantis, this charismatic green insect probably comes to mind.
But there are so many different species of mantis.
Mantises are an order of insects that contain over 2,400 species in about 460 genera in 33 families.
The closest relatives they have are cockroaches and termites, but even then they aren't that close.
They diverged from a common ancestor around 300 million years ago.
With thousands of praying mantis species in the world, the anatomy between them inevitably varies quite a bit.
The smallest mantis is the Bulbae pygmaea, which is about one centimeter long when fully grown.
The heaviest species of praying mantis is the West African megamantis, with the female sometimes weighing over 13 grams.
And the longest is the giant stick mantis from northern Africa, measuring over 17 centimeters in length.
And among all these species of praying mantis are some of the most fascinating examples of crypsis and mimicry in the animal kingdom.
The life of a praying mantis begins as it hatches from its egg sac, as it joins hundreds of its siblings and oozes down to the branches below.
These are orchid mantis nymphs, and from day one, they are already an evolutionary wonder.
These small insects mimic a type of assassin bug, a foul-tasting insect with an incredibly painful stab from its proboscis.
Cloaked in their disguise, these small nymphs will traverse the landscape of leaves and branches, hunting all that they can, snatching sizable prey.
They are also trying to evade confrontation with any predator.
But if they do come across a hungry foe, they have a surprising tactic up their sleeve.
This kung fu stance makes the nymph look bigger and more threatening, and is often enough to keep predators away.
And if they evade their many predators, they will turn into one of the most dazzling insects known to man, the orchid mantis.
But only if they're one of the lucky ones.
Orchid mantises are elusive animals that live in tropical forests of Southeast Asia, and the females look remarkably like the petals of orchid flowers.
And yes, sometimes they eat their babies.
They will even move with a swaying motion, as if being blown in the breeze.
Their deceptive appearance helps to conceal themselves from predators, but also to aid in ambush hunting.
They hide themselves in plain view, their flowery appearance luring in pollinating insects.
And then, before the pollinator knows what's happening, the mantis snatches it with blinding speed.
Field experiments show that orchid mantises attract wild pollinators at a rate even higher than real flowers.
Because their camouflage is used for hunting, and not just hiding from predators, this mimicry is sometimes called aggressive mimicry.
And it's so effective that the orchid mantis has to be evolutionarily careful.
If these mantids become too abundant, over-predation on pollinating insects could hurt the very thing they mimic.
And if the real orchids disappear, then the schtick is up.
Thus, the fact that orchid mantids are so rare and elusive may be a critical aspect of their success.
Their rarity may also ensure that the chances of pollinators encountering multiple orchid mantises are low, thus reducing the likelihood that pollinators will learn to distinguish deceptive orchid mantises from the real flowers.
This incredible mimicry is an example of adaptive resemblance, where the insects have evolved to look like a specific object.
This is different from the more commonplace crypsis, where animals evolve to simply blend in to their background.
This is common in praying mantids, too.
Many species are colored green or brown to blend into the vegetation.
Or there's the bark mantis that looks just like tree bark, or the desert mantis that looks just like sand.
But if you take a cryptic insect like this and put it on a plain background, it would still look like an insect.
But if you take a mantis that has specialized its resemblance and put it on a plain background, that mantis would still look like an orchid.
Other mantids in this category look just like green leaves, or others look indistinguishable from a twig.
This type of mimicry is so precise that researchers think some mantids evolved directly in parallel with the things they replicate.
But not all mantids resemble harmless sticks or flowers.
Many mantids resemble less than palatable things, or even things that are downright scary for their would-be predators.
The orchid mantis nymphs, as we already discussed, mimic the dangerous assassin bug.
The ant mantis, one of the smallest mantids, resembles a black ant in its juvenile stage.
Predators like birds and other large insects tend to avoid ants as prey because they can be aggressive, taste unpleasant, bite, or sting.
But there's one mantis that punches above its weight when it comes to what it mimics.
This is the iris oratoria, also known as the Mediterranean mantis.
At first glance, it looks like a fairly regular-looking mantis.
But when threatened, it lifts its forelegs, stares straight at the threat, and lifts its eyes in a striking eyespot.
Even in flight, researchers think this mimicry continues to work, the eyespots resembling the eyes of a flying owl.
But for all of the many camouflaging mantids out there, there's one difficult evolutionary question they face.
What happens if the leaves or flowers they mimic shrivel and die?
What happens if the green grass they hide within turns brown in a drought?
As I said before, if the orchids disappear, the orchid mantids are in serious trouble.
But for other mantids, if their habitat suddenly changes, it's not always so dire.
Because some mantids have a surprising trick that they can implement, a trick where they can change colors.
The Egyptian praying mantis lives in the savannas of Africa, where it lives on grass, doing its best to blend in.
But here, grass can change from brown to green within a few days following rain.
However, researchers noticed that when the grass was green, the mantids were green.
But when the grass was brown, the mantids were brown.
How can this be?
As far as we know, mantids can't change color like an octopus or chameleon, where the color change happens in seconds or minutes, triggered by hormones or neurons.
However, they can change color when they molt.
In this species, color change during molting is triggered by the relative humidity around them.
When the relative humidity is low, the nymphs become brown at the next molt.
When the relative humidity is high, they become green.
And they are not the only species to do this.
Other mantids can change color based on other stimuli.
For some species, the change is triggered by the light intensity around them.
High intensity light causes nymphs to change from green to brown.
To them, more light could indicate that the leaves of their hiding spot are shriveling and falling off due to drought, and their green color would not be of much help.
Other species of mantids in Africa even turn from green to black at the end of the dry season when most fires occur, a coloration known as fire melanism.
And other flower mantids can change color when moved from one coloration of flower to another.
All of this color changing in response to their habitat is called environmental polymorphism.
Mimicry in crypsis has been described as one of the most influential and illustrative examples of natural selection since the concept of evolution was discovered.
And the many different ways that praying mantis species use deception may be the most impressive that exist.
While looking at all of this visual deception, there's one more thing to consider with the praying mantis.
Human researchers are inevitably biased to look for crypsis and mimicry that we can see, since humans are primarily visual creatures.
But so much that happens in the insect world is auditory, chemical, or tactile.
As masters of deception, it's entirely possible that praying mantids are also audio mimics, or chemical ones for that matter.
After all, how does the orchid mantis attract more pollinators than real flowers?
Scent cues are important for pollinators to detect flowers.
So it's entirely plausible that mantises also mimic the smell of the flowers they visually emulate.
It's an area of research that's largely unexplored, and would be mind-blowing if we could prove it to be true.
But that's just a bit of fun speculation.
But beyond blending in to trick potential prey, how does a mantis execute its kills?
And how does it hunt prey so much bigger than itself?
Mantises can be loosely categorized as being long-winged, short-winged, or vestigial-winged.
The outer wings are usually narrow and leathery.
They function as camouflage, and as a shield for the hind wings, which are much more delicate.
When not in use, the wings are held close together over their body, giving them a streamlined appearance.
Whether a praying mantis can fly depends greatly on the species.
Praying mantises primarily use their wings for short bursts of flight or gliding while hunting or escaping predators.
They can also use their wings as a defense mechanism, by spreading them out suddenly and making loud noises that startle potential threats.
However, not all praying mantids have wings.
Some are wingless.
And mantids like this get around through incredibly accurate jumping.
Researchers found that wingless, juvenile thorny-armed praying mantises can jump from a horizontal surface to a vertical one, two body lengths away, with nearly 100% accuracy.
The high level of accuracy here is enabled by the rotation of their abdomen about the thorax.
Once airborne, they then transfer angular momentum to the other parts of their body and make a precise landing.
Researchers discovered just how important the transfer of angular momentum is for their jump by gluing a mantid's abdominal parts together so it couldn't properly rotate.
The accuracy of the jump itself wasn't really impeded.
The mantises still reached their target, but couldn't rotate their bodies into the correct position, so crashed face-first into it.
But winged or wingless, big or small, all mantids have greatly enlarged forelegs adapted for catching and gripping prey.
When stationary, these legs remain folded at the front of their bodies, giving them the name praying mantis.
Also known as raptorial claws, these front legs are highly specialized for grasping onto prey.
They're made up of five segments.
In praying mantids, the coxa is unusually long for an insect leg and is covered in spines.
The femur and tibia are similarly covered in tubercles.
These spines and tubercles enable the mantis to grab onto prey.
They are stiff yet lightweight, and once a prey animal is within their grasp, it is very hard for them to escape.
The strike of a praying mantis has two phases.
The first is the approach phase, where a mantis extends its arms up and outward.
Then there is the sweep phase, where the mantis scoops the prey out of the air and pulls it in to eat.
These strikes happen in less than a tenth of a second.
To understand more about praying mantis prey capture, I talked to Christopher Ophiro, professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Towson University.
I come from a vertebrate world originally, and comparing it to other organisms, there's not many that are throwing their arms out into the air to try and grab prey.
You know, you think about vertebrates that have tongues like chameleons and salamanders, or fish that use suction, or snakes that use their whole body, like here's these organisms that are using, you know, segmented forelegs to be able to capture prey in midair.
And because they are sit-and-wait predators, for a long time, scientists thought that their attacks were stereotypical, meaning that each praying mantis strike would always be the in the same direction, at the same angle, at the same speed.
But as experiments revealed, this is very much not the case.
They're pretty versatile in their prey capture.
I mean, if you think about their forelegs, there's three segments that they're moving to capture the prey, but there's a lot of potential versatility in how they move that, how fast, how much.
They can catch prey when it's above their head or below their feet, on the ground or in the air, far to their left or to their right, and they can eat a shocking variety of prey, from small insects to large ones, to frogs, lizards, and even birds.
They have no regard for the rules of the food chain.
Praying mantids can often be seen perched on hummingbird feeders, watching carefully as a hummingbird hovers near the sugary water.
When a bird comes within strike distance, usually 5 to 10 centimeters, the mantis quickly strikes with its two raptorial front legs while holding onto its perch with its other four legs.
The hummingbird may resist, but once the spines of its raptorial claws have locked in, there is no escape.
And like in this photo, it's common for the mantis to hold the bird by its skull and feed on its brain.
I think they're very opportunistic predators.
And if they think they can grab onto it and eat it, they're going to do that.
But it does suggest that they likely are producing some amount of force, a significant amount of force, as they sort of close those tibia on those femurs to be able to hold onto this prey and eat it basically alive.
The fact that they are eating organisms bigger than themselves and have to be able to handle that organism while it's still alive suggests that they are producing some amount of force to be able to do that.
But how does a mantis break through bone so easily?
The secret is in their strong jaws, or mandibles, which work like scissors, slicing through their prey with ease.
The slicing incisors are located beneath the palps, the four parts that look like mouth feelers.
They are specifically adapted to cut through tough exoskeletons and bone.
They're holding onto these prey for a significant amount of time and using their mandibles to shear off pieces and eat it.
And so this is a new project we haven't published on yet, but we're looking at ingestion rate.
How long does it take them to consume a prey, and does that differ between different predator sizes and or prey sizes?
And so we use the time lapse so we don't have to sit there and watch them eat.
We can set up little cameras, record it, and then get a better estimate of that time.
It lends itself to some pretty cool and kind of freaky footage.
With such strength and such speed, it's easy to see how a praying mantis kills its prey.
However, what is less clear is how it's so accurate in its strikes.
The animals the mantis hunts are fast, and yet with relative ease, such prey can be snatched out of midair.
How does a mantis know when the exact right moment to strike is?
One possibility scientists investigated was their hearing.
The praying mantis has just one ear located right where you'd expect it, on its belly, or rather in the ventral midline of the thorax.
It is sometimes called a cyclopsian ear, and it can hear only ultrasonic frequencies, generally between 25 and 50 kilohertz.
This wouldn't necessarily be useful in catching prey.
The flapping of many insect wings, like bumblebees, flies, or cicadas, make sound at around 270 hertz.
The praying mantis wouldn't be able to hear this.
Instead, researchers think this ultrasonic hearing could be used in predatory evasion.
And more specifically, in evading bats.
The most common biological source of ultrasound in the environment is echolocating bats using sonar to locate and capture flying insect prey.
The most sensitive hearing range for mantids corresponds exactly to the echolocation frequencies bats most commonly use.
So if the ears of the mantis are not how it detects its prey, it must come down to its other main sensory organ, its eyes.
The praying mantis has five eyes.
The three simple eyes, positioned on its forehead in the shape of an isosceles triangle, detect light intensity.
And their two big, mesmerizing compound eyes can detect color and movement.
These forward-facing eyes have an extensive binocular field, with 70 degrees binocular overlap.
This, combined with the fact that some species of mantis can rotate their heads nearly 180 degrees, means that mantises can easily scan their surroundings while their bodies remain stationary.
And if you get close to a mantis, you might notice a small black spot on its eye that looks like a pupil that follows your every move.
No matter what direction you look at their eyes, the black dot appears to track you.
This is known as a pseudopupil, and is in part why the praying mantis has a reputation for being so eerie.
But the praying mantis is not doing this on purpose.
In fact, it can't control it at all.
It's a passive, optical phenomenon.
It occurs because the omatidia that one observes head-on absorb the incident light, while those to the side reflect it.
Imagine trying to look through a few straws that are against a dark background.
The middle ones would look dark, while the ones further away from the center would look like whatever color the straws are.
This is because you're looking down through the middle straws, but you can't see all the way through the rest.
But just because this part of the mantis' watchful gaze is a bit of an optical illusion doesn't mean it isn't watching.
The eyesight of a praying mantis is so good that it can perfectly locate its prey in 3D space for a successful hit.
Researchers wondered, could the praying mantis really have true 3D vision, akin to human vision?
All sighted animals face the problem of deriving information about a 3D world from 2D retinal images.
How do animals tell what is small versus what is far away?
2D images contain a range of depth cues that can be used to derive information about 3D space.
One type of depth cue, for example, can be pictorial.
When looking at objects in the world, certain things occlude others, implying that they are the closer object.
However, this relies on assumptions and is not fully reliable.
What are much more reliable are triangulation depth cues.
These are based on comparing views of an object from multiple locations, aka from two different eyes.
These positional differences are referred to as horizontal disparities.
Stereoscopic vision, or 3D vision, is the ability to take these disparities and triangulate distance from them.
And comparing these different images in one's brain is called cross-correlation.
Almost all machine vision algorithms, and also biological stereovision that we know about in vertebrates, seems to work basically by doing cross-correlations.
Jenny Reid is a professor of vision science at Newcastle University and studies all aspects of stereovision.
You take the two eyes' images and you imagine sliding them across one another until you get the best match.
And you say, OK, now the correlation is at its peak and that's where the images match And with that offset, I can say the left eye matches the right eye and now I can figure out how far away something is.
This is a particularly reliable means of depth perception because it depends only on geometry rather than on assumptions.
When it was first described, scientists believed only primates and other mammals with large brains and front-facing eyes were capable of it, since it requires a lot of brain power.
But it turns out that many animals that have some overlap of visual fields are capable of stereopsis, including cats, owls, cuttlefish, and even toads.
But what about insects?
They aren't exactly known for their brain power, but scientists thought there might be an exception to this.
The praying mantis.
They have an extensive binocular visual field and a lot of neurons that receive input from both eyes and are sensitive to movement.
Could this be enough to impart 3D vision?
In 1983, scientists set up an ingenious experiment to find out.
They secured a praying mantis to a platform and secured a blowfly, one of its favorite snacks, to a post a few centimeters in front of it.
The researchers waited for the mantis to notice the fly, then would slowly move the fly closer to the mantis until it struck out with its reptorial claws to catch it.
This striking distance was noted.
Next the researchers fixed two prisms in front of the mantis' eyes.
These prisms increased the horizontal disparity between the eyes, meaning they shifted the view of each of them a little bit inward, artificially placing the fly closer to the mantis in 3D space.
Thus, if the mantis was indeed using binocular triangulation to locate and capture its prey, and not just other references like motion parallax or size of the prey, then it should strike short of the actual target.
And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.
And they found that the stronger the prism and more distortion, the shorter the striking distance.
The researchers had found the first case of an insect using 3D vision.
But is mantis vision like our own?
Do they compute 3D in the same way that we do, where they compare the differences between two images in what we call cross-correlation?
My assumption was mantids are probably doing this as well, but we should test it.
To find out, Jenny and her team set up one of the more stylish experiments ever done.
They gave the praying mantis special 3D glasses and put it in a mantis cinema.
We didn't use red-blue 3D glasses like the old-style ones you get for humans because insects typically don't see red light, so we used blue and green light.
In this mantis cinema, they showed the mantis a movie of prey, black and white dots hovering right in front of the mantis, where each eye saw a slightly shifted version from the other eye due to the 3D glasses.
And we did that with mantids, and sure enough, we could show that they could perceive the depth implied by the shift because they would try and catch those objects.
Great.
Are they doing that with correlation?
To test that, you now want to flip the black and white dots in one of the eyes.
So you've got a black dot in the left eye, it now matches a white dot in the right eye, and vice versa.
So if you create an image like that, it's called anti-correlated.
It's obviously completely artificial.
It's like nothing that you would ever see in real life.
And if you do that to human observers, it completely destroys their stereo depth perception.
And then you say, aha, that's because their visual system was using cross-correlation, and I've now messed with cross-correlation, so now they can't do it anymore.
So we thought we'd do that in mantises.
But to our great surprise, they could still do the task just fine.
They weren't fazed at all by the anti-correlation.
How could this be?
Jenny and her team got a hint when they realized one thing, that the mantis could only continue to see the dots if the dots were moving.
When the dots stayed still in any of the experimental setups, the mantises didn't try to catch it.
We realized that the inputs to their stereo visual system aren't the pattern of black and white dots at all, it's the pattern of movement.
This experiment thus showed that mantis stereopsis doesn't work for static images, but it works extremely well to help them discriminate depth in targets that are perfectly camouflaged apart from their motion.
In these situations, the mantises were actually better than humans at discriminating depth of a moving camouflaged object.
And this makes a lot of sense when you think about the hunting strategy of a praying mantis.
Their prey is often highly camouflaged, so being able to quickly identify just their movements in 3D space is an efficient and effective way to grab their next meal.
It's as if they have a different algorithm running in their brains to interpret 3D vision than ours, one that's simpler and more efficient.
And it could be a game-changer in the world of computer vision.
As we learned more about how mantis vision works, it really blew my mind because it was completely different from human vision, right, which just depends on motion.
I think in machine vision, we're always using the human as a gold standard, and like, can my computer algorithm reproduce the abilities of human stereoscopic vision, which may be very appropriate, but it may be massively over-engineered for what you need.
But just because mantis stereopsis is simpler and requires less brainpower doesn't mean that the mantis brain is unimpressive.
Despite their tiny size, mantis brains contain a surprising number of neurons that enable this 3D vision.
They're also pretty smart.
Do you think it speaks at all to a certain level of intelligence in these bugs?
Intelligence is a tricky question.
They're likely making decisions, right, not to anthropomorphize, but like a decision based upon when to try and capture that prey.
And some of that is based upon their vision, like there's great research showing that with their depth perception, they are more prone to try to capture prey when they're at a certain distance, right?
So how you view that in the lens of intelligence is tricky because they're not just going after anything, right?
They are making decisions based upon some threshold in their central nervous system says, okay, now we try to capture that, right?
You know, they're not having full on conversations, intelligence, but they're not just doing the same thing over and over without adjusting.
And they've been seen to take their impressive predatory ability and adapt it in novel ways when put in new situations.
Recently a scientist observed a mantis fishing guppies out of a fountain, a never before seen behavior.
Their ability to adapt to new situations on the fly makes researchers think that they're much more clever than we even realize.
But there's one more aspect of their behavior that gets them their uncanny reputation.
And that's their appetite for their boyfriends.
If you knew anything about praying mantids before this video, it was probably that the females eat their mates.
Maybe you heard that the females decapitate the males while still copulating with their But death by cannibalism is not inevitable for the males.
Scientists estimate it only happens in 13 to 28% of encounters in the wild, but it largely depends on the species and also the condition of the females.
One study investigated the motivation behind these boyfriend eating events and how it relates to the female's condition.
They started by dividing female mantises into four feeding regimes.
Good, medium, poor, and very poor.
The good group getting the best diet, with the very poor getting the worst.
The females got these diets for six weeks and then were placed in proximity to males.
The females then attract the males by signaling with pheromones.
And the researchers found that there was a clear line between the number of males who fed they were.
Those from the good group got the most, those from the poor group got the least, possibly because the poor group had the least energy to emit pheromones.
But something interesting happened with the very poor group of females.
Even more males approached them than the females with the good diet.
And when the males came over, they ate them.
The study author hypothesized that this was because the females who were effectively starving put all of their energy towards pheromones so that they would attract the males and then get a chance to eat them.
And this strategy really worked out in the case of the study subject, the false garden mantis.
The females who ate a male had a 33% improvement in body condition and a 40% increase in fecundity.
And this is critical, because the females have to do a lot of work to produce eggs.
Praying mantis females produce what's called an ootheca.
It's basically an egg case with a protective outer shell that contains hundreds of eggs.
And these things can be huge, weighing 30-50% of the female's body mass.
It would be like an average human giving birth to a 75 pound baby.
And just like with humans, the male mantises don't have to invest hardly any energy into reproduction.
They can also mate with multiple females so long as they don't get eaten.
The males will generally approach very slowly, probably nervously, often mounting the female from behind, and copulation can take anywhere from 2 hours to 40.
Which gives the female a lot of time to attack if she's feeling snacky.
So calories really seem to be the main motivator for the females, although scientists speculate that sometimes the females attack because they're not yet sexually mature when the males approach them, which is a tactic I think humans should employ too.
Mainly though, it's because they're hungry.
In the Chinese mantis, one study estimated that males made up 63% of the diet for females.
And the females aren't necessarily losing their chance to mate, since the males can be literally cut in half and still use the bottom half of their bodies to pass the sperm onto the females.
But the system seems highly rigged in favor of the females.
Is getting eaten just a cost that the males have to be willing to pay?
It turns out that even when the males do get eaten, there is a slight upside for them.
Researchers found that the amino acids from the male's digested body goes into the female's eggs, and the female tends to produce more eggs after she's eaten a male.
So at least the genetic material of the cannibalized male gets passed on more effectively.
After immersing myself in the world of praying mantids for weeks, what's the final verdict you may ask?
Are they still creepy little freaks, or dazzling displays of evolution?
I think the answer is both.
People always have their different takes on life, right?
This is just nature, right?
Some people may think they're creepy, but they're pretty fascinating when you really get to observe them more closely.
To people who find praying mantids creepy, I always say, I'm 100% with you.
They're very sinister.
I think that the way they tend to lock on to a prey item and track it, you can always hear, there's a target acquired.
And so as you handle them, they lock onto you, and they'll track you as you move.
And I always thought, thank God I'm massively bigger than this tiny insect, and it can't actually attack me and eat me.
So yes, definitely both.
Luckily, getting the opinions of both Chris and Jenny helped me see a fuller picture of the praying mantis, an insect I've loved from a distance for a long time, but one that they've dedicated years of their life to understanding.
To watch the full-length interviews with the two scientists featured in this video, head over to Nebula, where you can watch them under the Field Notes channel.
This is a Nebula channel where I upload extras, extended interviews, and behind-the-scenes content.
Before I get into how great Nebula is, I know so many of you are sick of being asked to sign up to yet another subscription service.
I know I'm actively trying to drop recurring monthly charges.
But if you do want to support this channel and get lifelong access to all of Nebula's exclusive content without a monthly charge, we're offering lifetime memberships for a limited time for $300.
Unlike other subscriptions, you can buy once and never pay again.
This helps fund original series like Archaeology Quest, where I went out into the woods with my friend and co-writer Lorraine, where we put ourselves to the test trying to compete in tasks to survive the Paleolithic.
We made stone tools and ceramic bowls, threw spears and collected mushrooms, all to try to see if we would have what it takes to live in ancient times.
This series is a mix of fun gameplay, hilarious failures, and in-depth archaeology education about technology from 10,000 years ago.
This is a series that wouldn't have worked on real science on YouTube because it's just too different from what I normally do.
But I wanted to make something interactive and funny.
I wanted to practice being on camera, and so when I pitched this show to Nebula, they helped make it happen.
Nebula is the platform where creators can experiment like this, with Nebula original content that breaks the mold or is too risky for YouTube.
And if the lifetime membership isn't for you, for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month, you can get access to all of Nebula's original content along with our entire catalog without any ads.
You can also easily download videos to watch on the go, all for just $2.50 a month.
This channel depends on the funding Nebula provides us.
The video you just watched is long, has lots of animations, and took me a long time to make.
To be able to make longer, in-depth videos like this one, I have to slow down upload pace.
I simply can't make these videos as fast as the YouTube algorithm wants me to.
Even getting this done in a month was difficult.
A two-week upload pace nearly kills me, and those videos are shorter and not as detailed.
It's such a tricky balance on YouTube, the quantity versus quality debate, and unfortunately taking the time to slow down and create longer, better videos is a financial risk.
YouTube is a volatile platform, and we depend on the whims of advertisers.
All of the pressure tells YouTube creators to speed up and crank out more content, not slow down.
But it's so important to me to bring you all the depth these stories deserve.
And Nebula is our life raft to make that possible.
Nebula helps remove the financial uncertainty that forces us to rush projects, and allows us to focus on science journalism rather than stressing over YouTube analytics.
Signing up to Nebula is the best way to support this channel for that reason.
So to get access to all of Nebula's incredible content, and support thoughtful, educational content, go to nebula.tv slash real science, or click on the link in the description to get 40% off a yearly subscription for the incredibly low price of $2.50 per month.