After I posted my photo of a praying mantis in my back yard, Boing Boing reader The Black Sickle shared this terrific HD video he shot (with a Nikon D90) of a mantis eating a grasshopper. (Click the HQ button in the YouTube player for high quality.)
Praying Mantis consumes grasshopper.
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He's double fisting that shit :D
Nomnomnomnom!
there's a ton of great bug fight videos on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=praying+mantis
or try "giant wasp"
Oh man, the sadistic bastard eats him alive... :o
... There was disturbingly little left of the grasshopper by the time it finally stopped moving.
I'll never be able to read Nor Crystal Tears again...
(Just kidding. We had lots of praying mantids around when I was young. They're fascinating, pretty, and pretty human-tolerant. As an adult looking at them, however, I'm more aware of just how different they are from, well, anything non-insect. I don't know the word -- xeno-something, I'm sure, being aware of the alienness.)
(And yes, I know, they're not extraterrestrial.)
Doesn't waste a single morsel.
Here's a photo of a praying mantis that stalked and captured a hummingbird to eat:
http://www.neatorama.com/2009/09/09/praying-mantis-catches-a-hummingbird/
Man, that would suck.
om nom nom
Sadly, the mantis was really praying for a caterpillar, but a bug has to take whatever the bug god provides.
I love how she holds the grasshopper delicately by the antenna, like a hot dog on a stick. I was thinking "is she gonna eat the antenna too?" but yes! Of course she is! I love the delicate, mouth-wiping mandible action in close-up.
Ah, backyard entomology is so great! I look forward with great joy to an abundance of beautiful, gory and amazing small-scale nature documentaries with the increasing quality and decreasing prices of cameras capable of capturing on this scale.
It never ceases to amaze me just how capable such tiny living being are of such intricate and coordinated behaviour. It truly humbles me to think how far away humans are at reproducing something even remotely close. Many of the "X eats Y" videos on youtube hold that beauty: something of such apparently simple construction manages to catch, subdue, eat and digest and reproduce of something of equally simple design, while both sides show extraordinarily complex behaviours.
As I always say, The head is the hardest to eat but boy is it ever worth all the effort. : )
I was waiting for him, at the end, to turn to the camera and burp. Also, needs Yakkity-Sax version.
Could you imagine if he were 20 feet tall and coming after you?
I adored that he saved the head for last and even ate the antennae. I could watch stuff like this all day.
Fred H: http://james.nerdiphythesoul.com/bennyhillifier/?id=aQTpCGChA6A
The birds soundtrack seems inappropriate for this kind of violence.
She's eating it like a tiny woodchipper.
Quick ! hide the body !
Those things bite like fury. No venom that I know of but they have a hell of a grip with their mandibles. It's a really unique experience playing with one.
It is a katydid, not a grasshopper.
I was a little disappointed that it didn't make that "omnomnomnom" sound while it was eating.
http://www.gladiatorbugs.com
'nuff said.
I saw a mantis eating a cicada when I was a little girl. I have been afraid of both bugs since then. The cicada was screaming and half its face was gone.
Nature makes the best horror films.
Dang, someone mentioned the hummingbird. One of our entomology faculty had a picture of something like that and it horrified me (being a bird lover and all).
Only one more comment: Zorak!!
I take it, you've not read "Eat them alive" by Pierce Nace?