Praying mantises (Mantodea) comprise nearly 3000 species of hypercarnivorous insects across the globe. These insects are known for using coordinated, rapid movements of their forelegs to capture evasive prey in less time than a blink of an eye. Mantises are widely considered generalist predators yet exhibit significant variation in their cryptic strategies, habitat preferences, and foreleg morphology, suggesting there are differences in prey consumption. Our project aims to test the variation in prey capture of praying mantises by comparing kinematics among ecomorphs and determine if there are differences between species and within ecomorphs. We filmed 10 species of mantis in 4 ecomorph groups. Generalist species included Stagmomantis limbata, Tenodera sinensis, and Chopardiella pouliani. The dead leaf ecomorph included Deroplatys truncata, and Phyllocrania paradoxa. The stick ecomorph included Euchomenella heteroptera, and Pseudovates chlorophea. The flower ecomorph included Pseudocreobotra wahlbergii, Theopropus elegans, and Hymenopus coronatus. In all species a minimum of 3 females were prompted to strike in 5 separate trials per individual, using Calliphora vomitoria as prey, resulting in roughly 250 prey capture events. All filming was done on a dorsal and lateral view of the mantis using 2 high-speed cameras recording the entire strike at 1000 Hz. Ten points across the mantis’ forelegs and body were tracked by both machine learning and manual tracking to obtain 3D kinematics for each strike (e.g. angular velocity, prey capture space). Differences in prey capture kinematics between species or similarities between ecomorphs, would indicate that there may be differences in prey consumption in Mantodea.
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