After a horrendous storm tonight that dropped some much-needed rain, and then a lot more too, I was checking out the environs of Walkabout Estates, noticing that the edgeworthia/paperbush was significantly happier now – it had not liked the heat at all, and no amount of water that I offered seemed to help much. Nearby, though, something odd caught the headlamp, one of those little pattern-breaking things that deserve a closer look; it wasn’t the normal leaves of a small sapling, showing the wrong shapes and colors.
It was an adult Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis,) a little earlier than expected, especially since about a week ago I’d been observing one less than half this size. It was obviously having trouble with its right side elytron, which is the wing sheath that covers the flight wings. I gently detached it from the bush and then juggled it for five minutes or so in an attempt to remedy this situation, thinking that it might simply have gotten blown askew in the recent storm. The mantis did not take kindly to this, and repeatedly clutched at me with each of its foot hooks (ungues) or, if I didn’t have a firm hold of its thorax, attempted to fly away, which always resulted in a half-hearted flutter down to the ground or branch beneath it.
Eventually, I got a decent, yet gentle, grip on the curled elytron and determined that it was firmly shaped this way and would not simply uncurl back into proper shape. To the best of my knowledge, the mantis ran into some difficulty soon after molting into its adult form, while the wings were unfurling and drying, and the elytron settled into this shape. This did seem to be hampering its ability to fly, and I’m not exactly sure how much this would affect things. Until the final instar, adult stage, they have no wings and are strictly ambulatory, but they develop wings for a reason, likely to assist with mating in some way.
I did not have the camera in hand when I first found it, which was good in that I had the free hands to try and assist, so I had to go inside afterward and get the camera and flash rig. On returning just two minutes later, it took a little while to find the mantis even though it couldn’t fly anywhere, but that’s where these photos came from (with the new new softbox, which I’ll go into later.) The mantis was intent on making good time and scrambling among the ivy and vinca, making me work to keep up and stay focused. This doesn’t give me confidence that I’ll ever be able to find it again, but I guess we’ll see what happens.