So what do you feed mantids that small?

these guys get drosophilia hydei fruitflies after they started eating each other instead of the drosophilia melanogaster i had been feeding them prior. they eat flies as big as they are so they don't eat each other, haha.

so where do you get the flies from or do you grow them too?

i purchase cultures from flycafe.net and then the cultures produce until they run out of stuff to eat. i can grow them myself but i prefer to purchase them instead.

gotcha, didn't even know a place existed LOL

yes, haha. there's all sorts of places to go for supplies ;3

Wow they're gorgeous. Do you sell your babies when they get old enough? I have always wanted to keep mantids :)

ah, i can be convinced to sell them, haha. baby egyptians, like pictured here, go for around 2$ a piece if you were interested. they all just molted to L2 over the weekend, so they're a bit more stable now. i don't have as many as pictured here anymore (some have died, others eaten) but i could potentially sell a few :>

i may also have chinese nymphs if these ooths i have are fertile and they would be MUCH cheaper, though a lot more fragile as well.

Considering I have not yet worked with mantises I wouldn't want to jump on the bandwagon with a really fragile little nymph. How long do these guys normally take to grow to be at least strong enough for me not to worry about killing them? I mean granted I have worked with tarantulas, scorpions, and millipedes before, but NEVER a mantis.

honestly, the worst trouble is making it to the first molt. i did have a really unfortunate experience in that out of 11 chinese nymphs i purchased, only two of them have survived this far. though, two more would be in this mix if not for one eating them, haha. but the others all died within a bit of each other, and i heard from a lot of my mantis keeping friends that a significant portion of theirs died too, so i wonder if it's not an environmental trigger that did it rather than error on my part.

really, egyptians are pretty hardy, unlike the chinese. out of four, i have three left, and again, the one that i lost was eaten when i was an hour late on feeding them. the egyptians also, unlike the chinese, are a more communal species and you can raise them together indefinitely/much longer than others so long as you keep them well fed.

you do have quite a bit of invert experience under your belt, so really, i think you'd probably do just fine. mantises eat a whole lot more and more often than you're probably used to, though. you more or less feed them until they don't eat any more and then do it again when the leftovers disappear. if you have any specific questions, feel free to PM me :>

and that how you feed your pet too?

hahaha, not intentionally! these are baby mantises, so they need to be fed too! unfortunately a lot of them ate each other because other mantises are bigger than the flies i was giving them.