Reptile & Amphibian Forums

So.......a few days ago my male was laying in the bottom of his cage dead. The day before he was eating and acting normally. So today and came home and looked at my female. She was hanging from her plant with her front legs folded and looked normal. When I looked closer I noticed a huge drop of blood on her neck. She was dead. She looked alive but wasn't. I have never seen a mantid hanging there and dead. What would cause the blood which is what I guess killed her. Maybe a cricket bit her neck when she was eating it? I don't know. My chinese mantid is normal.

Sound very strange, Theres no way in hell a cricket can bite a mantid to death! Unless the mantid was small and cricket was huge, The mantid would have grabbed it and pulled it away though.

I'm sorry to hear about your carolina mantids Rick. My guess with the blood on the neck is it either was a cricket that might have gotten to her while eating, the larger crickets have pretty respectable pinchers when you look closer to them. In fact, if I'm in a shortage of food, and I have to feed a large cricket to a smaller mantis, I take the time to crush/break off the pinchers of the cricket just to make sure that doesn't happen. My other guess is that if you mated them, the male might have been a little too rough with her. A pair of chinese mantids that I once mated had that problem. The male damaged the females abdomin during the mating, and she died three days later. Who knows??

They had mated several days before this happened. But she was fine earlier the day I found her. The crickets were all the perfect size for her. They were small. Thanks for the replies. I am still stumped. I looked closely at her and I did not see any trauma.

Sorry to hear the bad news.

This is meant to be a humorous commentary on a tragic situation. The locked-door murder mystery genre that made sherlock holmes a household name are fun to read. Even more fun is when you have a double murder to solve on your own.

Sadly, the only real-life explaination for a locked-door death is suicide. I suspect you mated them, they fell in love, they couldn't stand to be apart, and much like romeo and juliet, they ended their own lives. Silly I know, but humans are always attaching human-like emotions to non-humans and objects.