{"id":37916,"date":"2024-12-11T06:00:11","date_gmt":"2024-12-11T11:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=37916"},"modified":"2024-12-10T15:34:30","modified_gmt":"2024-12-10T20:34:30","slug":"just-once-part-50","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2024\/12\/just-once-part-50\/","title":{"rendered":"Just once, part 50"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"unknown
This is one that I’m faintly frustrated at only having captured once. First featured 9 years ago but actually taken 14 years back, it looked to me like a cross between a lacewing and a praying mantis – which is largely what it is. It’s a member of the Mantispidae<\/em>, or mantisflies, possibly a green mantisfly (Zeugomantispa minuta<\/em>.) While the praying mantids that we’re all familiar with have wings as adults and can indeed fly, they aren’t very closely related at all;<\/strong> mantisflies are Order Neuroptera<\/em>, while mantids are Order Mantodea<\/em>. This means that the similarity in appearance in only coincidental, a case of convergent evolution – but boy, do they look similar. Except for the size, since my adult specimen here is somewhere in the vicinity of 10mm, while adult Chinese mantids get a lot closer to 80mm. Back in 2010 I wasn’t half as well set up to do detailed macro work as I am now, so naturally I’ve been wanting to tackle the same species again when I can do a better job, but I’ve never seen any sign of them since.<\/p>\n

I might have missed an opportunity, though. While researching the various species, I stumbled upon a photo<\/a> that looked quite familiar, almost identical in fact to something that I’d captured earlier<\/a> – which may mean that I had an entire egg cluster hatch within easy reach and never knew that it was a target species. That year (2013,) however, was one that I was extraordinarily active with arthropod photography, so I feel reasonably comfortable that I was performing due diligence in watching for the adults – I doubt that I could have found one if I’d been more alerted to their presence. Tracking the newborns in their life cycle would have been virtually impossible, given that they were a mere millimeter in length when born and soon dispersed. Back then I was likely mistaken as to what they were, so even capturing a few and trying to keep them in a terrarium wouldn’t have been successful because I would probably have been trying feed them the wrong stuff – the larvae feed on spider eggs, and Bubble Yum<\/a> has been discontinued for a while now.<\/p>\n

[Actually, no it hasn’t – might have to go to the store later on today, get some nostalgia.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is one that I’m faintly frustrated at only having captured once. First featured 9 years ago but actually taken 14 years back, it looked to me like a cross between a lacewing and a praying mantis – which is largely what it is. It’s a member of the Mantispidae, or mantisflies, possibly a green […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[3225,3223,3226,3224],"class_list":["post-37916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-photo","tag-green-mantisfly","tag-mantis-fly","tag-mantispidae","tag-zeugomantispa-minuta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}