Large Brown Mantid, Archimantis latistyla

Plate 130. Large Brown Mantid, Archimantis latistyla

The name Mantis is, not only from the prophet-like customary attitude, but an allusion to their long emaciated forms; Theocritus being so injudicious as to see a resemblance between them and a thin young girl with long skinny arms.

The Mantidae are often confounded with the leaf-eating Phasmce (of which examples are figured on our Plates 69, 70, and 79 of Decades VII. and VIII.), from which they differ in the raptorial anterior legs, carnivorous habits, and many points of structure. They wait motionless on trees and shrubs for the approach of smaller insects, which they suddenly snap up in the bend of their raptorial fore-legs, tearing them voraciously with their mandibles.