August 1st, 2015. Brittany was walking down the road to our new apartment in Inokashira, Tokyo. She spotted a praying mantis on the fence, its arms outstretched as if to say "pick me up, mom!". She brought it home and we put it in a terrarium from the 100 yen store. I didn't want to keep it at first, thinking that it would be happier in the wild, but she convinced me. We internet-identified her as a female, and named her Severnaya (after the Russian weapons facility in Goldeneye, due to her evident badassery).
We went hunting for crickets and cockroaches for her every other night or so. Mantises only eat live prey, so we had to catch them alive. She tore them asunder like a true predator.
We would take her out drinking with us sometimes, and she would sit on our head or shoulders, She always wanted to be picked up and seemed to enjoy watching the world from her high vantage point.
Cicada season hit, and all the cicadas began molting, leaving their shells behind. We found this little guy in the process of molting, and helped him out of his shell. Severnaya didn't want to eat him, so they had play-dates instead.
She did, however, love to mow down on cockroaches. Crickets were her staple, but she loved the hunt of the faster, larger, juicy trash aficionados.
We left a bunch of food in her terrarium and went to Korea for a week. When we came back, her wings were stuck in the open position. She must have fallen and bent one when they were open, and it wouldn't bend back. It didn't seem to bother her, though. You can see she's starting to get fat. Her abdomen was swelling with eggs, which the females lay whether they've been fertilized or not. It was time to start looking for a mate.
Attempted mate #1. This guy was all up on her, but she wasn't having it. He ended up falling off (or being pushed off?) and died. She stared at his corpse for a day, as if contemplating death. If she was heartbroken or traumatized by the death of her first suitor, she didn't hold on to it for long.
Suitor #2. He was an aggressive, feisty douchebag from the start. A real lady's man. He wouldn't stop freaking out and flying full speed into the sides of the terrarium. She was put off by him at first, but eventually, he must have caught wind of her pheromones, and his prime directive changed from escape to bumping uglies. Apparently he had demonstrated his prowess somewhere in all those panic attacks, and she gracefully received his loads of mantis sperm. Here we have captured the deed in all its glory.
Everyone has heard that the female will bite off the head of the male prior to or after sex, but she's a gentle soul and opted not to (or she was just really full from her constant buffet of insects). We released the male out the window when they were done. He seemed a lot more sated and calm. He flew into a tree and was never seen again.
Over the course of the next month, Severnaya laid these two beautiful ootheca (egg sacks) on the roof of the terrarium. The crickets and cockroaches really wanted to eat them, so we took them off and put them in the refrigerator to keep them in stasis. With a move to Hawaii planned for the near future, we hoped to prolong the hatching until we had taken them across the ocean, to spread her genes and her legacy.
October 30th. One of our last days in Tokyo. We released her into the park, by the stream next to which we caught the majority of her food. Some hungry crows eyed us from the path, and winter was coming, so all the other mantises had presumably died already. She outlived them all, and lived a life of luxury. I don't know if she was eaten by a crow or went on to live a little longer. We put her in a bush to hopefully camouflage her.
The last picture taken of Severnaya. Her little head turned to watch us go.
The ootheca were placed in some empty supplement bottles for their journey overseas. Luckily they made it past customs. We used double-sided tape to affix them to the ceiling of the new terrarium in the same position she had laid them. For a month, they sat motionless. We wondered if the lack of oxygen in the bottle had killed them. We wondered if the eggs needed a diapause for the duration of winter, seeing as how it was a temperate mantis and not a tropical one. We wondered if the climate had killed them. But then, finally, on December 8th...
Babies! One of the ootheca spewed forth a tidal wave of little Severnayas.
She lives on, 3,850 miles across the ocean from the place of her birth. Her sons and daughters will inhabit the jungles of Oahu, the bane of cockroaches, just like their mother (and their no good, deadbeat dad). We will keep one or two of them when they get a little older, and release the rest into the wild (and yes, we already checked, this is a Chinese mantis, which is already present in both Japan and Hawaii and is not an invasive species).
The circle of life continues!
