I knew it was going to happen but...

My scorpions died a while ago so I cleaned out the terrarium and put a preying mantis in it. My husband said that if we kept it and fed it all winter that it would be huge by spring. Cool beans.

I told the kids I thought it was a girl mantis.

The other night we got home late and there were a couple skinny mantises with straight wings on the screen door. Boy mantises!

So... we put a boy mantis in with the girl mantis.

They mated!

And then she bit off his head.

And ate him.

Now, I knew this was going to happen. At least I figured it was highly likely. I still feel guilty. Like a mantis killer. What did that poor guy do to deserve that? I felt horrible. And it was gruesome. He walked around headless while she ate his head. Not that he got very far. And then she ate the rest.

And I tell myself... if he found a girl friend in the wild, she'd have eaten his head, too. Or maybe he wouldn't have found a mate and when it got cold he'd just die with nothing to show for it.

I feel guilty every time I squish a spider, too. (Which isn't often... trust me.)

Something about certain creatures just makes them seem to have... personality or something.

I can butcher a chicken and I kill mice for my snakes every time I feed them. I am *not* squeamish.

Comments

Ymarsakar said…

Is it because they are so helpless and unlike farm animals, requires constant supervision?

6:46 PM

Ymarsakar said…

I was re-listening to some of the FireFly signals podcasts, which I never finished cause I was waiting for the movie Serenity.

Link

If you go to Season 1 and Episode 17 and afterwards, they around that episode time bracket provides audio recordings of DragonCon where there was some hilarious stuff going on between the Firefly Brown Coats and Firefly's staff.

Thought you might be interested, if you like FireFly, since there's a lot of in jokes going on there. If you already listened to the podcast, I would be interested in what you thought about it.

6:51 PM

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