Yet an other great work find!

[Ratmosphere]

Funny how I practically live in the woods and never find cool inverts but work in the city and find all sorts of them. Weird how that works! Anyway, found this beauty today!

 

[Ratmosphere]

Here's a short video I took of it.

 

[Messerschmitt]

Very nice, wish I could find cool stuff like this at my job! All I can find are red ants lol.

 

[LawnShrimp]

A lovely green lady, too bad her lifespan's almost over.

I caught a total of five sinensis this summer. One was a massive bluish-green female with a mangled raptorial, a frightfully aggressive brown female I found in a garage (she was covered in spiderwebs and was painfully thin), and a bunch of males all with wing and leg defects. The males all were released or died of natural causes, whereupon they were fed to the females. Fortunately, they fathered several oothecae apiece.

(That brown female attacked me every time I touched her, even if she herself walked onto my hand. She tore apart carpenter bees, hornets, and hornworms despite being half an inch smaller than the average female.)

As the weather got colder, the two females stopped ooth-ing, wouldn't respond to visual cues, and refused food. I took them outside to the bushes where they could expire in peace. Oddly enough, the green female found her way to my tank full of Triops and was perched above it for hours. I moved her away so she didn't fall in, but she reappeared as I was going inside for the day. The next morning she was floating in the water. I'm not sure if she was hunting the erratic movement of the Triops, jumped and missed, or committed suicide.

At least with mantids, there's always next year, though I miss their little head movements and dignified shenanigans...

 

[Smokehound714]

tenodera ftw!