What

yes

They had those at my high school occasionally, which seemed odd; kind of more of an elementary school oriented thing. Then again, I think they just fed us all the same things because it was cheaper. Naturally, we were still immature enough to cover bite marks with ketchup and chuckle at our plates of gorily mutilated heads.

Vaguely still on the topic of food, I have to figure out how I'm going to feed the mantis that I just caught and decided to make a pet. For now, grasshoppers, moths, and the occasional cricket will be easy enough to catch, but if I somehow manage to not kill it from neglect in the next couple weeks, the local wild supply will run low as it cools down, and I'll have to look at buying insects, or see if it'll eat any meats.

Worse case scenario, it's one of the species that can reproduce asexually, it'll lay an egg sack, and 400 cannibalistic mantis nymph clones will climb out of the air holes and down my throat as I sleep at night.

Breed silkworms
They're really easy to keep as a live food source and the adult moths are both adorable and have lost the ability to fly

Just saw that my 2012 thread went from 2 pages to 6 and I didn't get to reply why I made it in the first place. ;_;

So I dunno if Oph is gonna read this or not, but I made that thread half 'cos I'm an internet retard hurr durr but also because I'm the kind of Agnostic person that just doesn't know. I mean, I'm waiting for some SOLID evidence by my standards to prove to me that God/Heaven/Hell/Apocalypse/etc exists or will happen.

So yeah, I thought that was a good enough reason to make a thread. Ophviosly not.

CC48 has mantises, he feeds them crickets and got them to breed sexually.

Is there another way he could have gotten them to breed?

I just read the entire Apocalypse 2012 thread, goddamn that was funny, easily one of the top 10 threads of the year.

A BOOT STAMPING ON A KEYBOARD

FOREVER

I thought the bits of that topic which I am assuming everyone is raving about were fairly juvenile and uninteresting but it was clearly locked for a reason so let's not start all that again
Obviously I had to get in the last word before using my 0 authority to tell everyone to shut up

Oh. I missed that. Well, that's disturbing.

Yeah, sexually as opposed to asexually. Male and female, getting down to some funky tunes. I'm not sure what the status was on them at the moment.

Azukki, buying crickets from the pet store works. If your mantises are still young, you should hold them daily or at least every other day to get them used to you, and they'll end up becoming rather friendly. If they're already adults, there's not much of a point keeping them, since they're not going to live for much longer, unless if you plan on mating them.

It's already plenty old, being four inches long already.
The idea was to just have a fascinating captured specimen for a while, not so much to have a proper 'pet.' So yeah, a bit pointless, but it's something to do.
Judging from the place found, size, and colorings, I'm vaguely guessing it's a female Chinese Mantis.

With the asexual bit, I brought that up because I read that some mantis species' (I don't know which) females will sometimes, when there's no mate, make egg sacks that don't use male fertilization and are just clones of mom.