These pocket-sized predators are formidable hunters. But when it comes to hooking up, male mantises have good reason to fear commitment.
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Mike Maxwell recently finished a ninth season studying the love life of the praying mantises that live around Bishop, a town in California’s Eastern Sierra.
Over that time, he’s seen some unsettlingly strange behaviors.
It’s pretty common knowledge that female mantises sometimes eat males during or after mating — a habit that biologists call “sexual cannibalism.â€
But among the bordered mantises that Maxwell researches, it gets weirder than that.
As it turns out, when a male mantis ...
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