BrainStuff Classics: Do Female Praying Mantises Really Decapitate Mates?

The female praying mantis: maneater or misaligned? Learn the science behind this popular semi-myth in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
brain Stuff, Lauren vogle bum here with a classic episode
from our podcast archives. There are a lot of myths
out there about animal behavior that stem from assumptions that
people made in the past, either out in the world
or in the science lab. So how does the tail

(00:23):
that female praying mantis is decapitate their mates hold up?
It was the premise of an episode in season one
of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, So it must be true, right, Hi,
brain Stuff, Lauren vogle bam here. It's long been an
excitedly repeated myth that female praying mantis is have no
problem engaging in violent, cannibalistic murder when confronted with a

(00:43):
friendly mate, perhaps because school classrooms often host terrariums with
mantis subjects. It's one of those rumors that even children
seem to know. Don't breed with a female mantis lest
your head becomes her dinner. Sounds scary, but is it
true to the females of the species actually eat or
decapitate their mate, or are they simply being maligned by
alarmed men who perhaps empathize a little too much with

(01:05):
their insect brethren. The key to understanding these questions is
the word species, because while we might have a picture
of a standard looking green mantis in our head, there
are actually two thousand, four hundred species of the sucker.
Some are colorful, some are creepy, and some, yes, some
are cannibals. But before we get into the occasionally cruel
lifestyle of the female mantis, let's take a second to

(01:26):
examine the basis of the naybe myth. What we discover
is that the myth is rooted in well documented science.
In an eight eight six observation from the journal Science,
entomologist Leland Assian Howard noted that on placing a male
mantis with a female, the female systematically proceeded to eat
the male's left leg, left eye, and right leg, and

(01:47):
then decapitate him and eat his head. The male, keep
in mind, was attempting to mate with her the whole time,
which she eventually acquiesced to with her headless and mostly
legless partner. While Howard stressed that he had never seen
it before, he also rather breathlessly stated, it seems to
be only by accident that a male ever escapes alive
from the embraces of his partner. We see how this

(02:09):
could make everyone think that mantis ladies were nothing but
bloodthirsty harpies. But remember Howard saw this once with one
species of mantis, Mantis Carolina. Decapitation or cannibalism went on
to be observed in Mantis religiosa as well, and a
few other scientists studied the question of why decapitation would
be useful for mating. Some theories the decapitation might cause

(02:29):
sexual movements in the male abdomen, or perhaps part of
the thorax might actually inhibit sexual movements. Both theories were
later proved false. So here's the real deal. Female mantises
have occasionally been observed to cannibalize and decapitate their mates,
but by and large doesn't seem to be the case.
A study in animal behavior made it forty pairs of
mantis is only one was decapitated in almost seventy encounters.

(02:54):
Bottom line, you can stop with the cliche female mantis jokes.
Dating is hard enough. Nobody needs a reputation as a
man eator. Today's episode was written by Kate Kirshner and
produced by Tristan McNeil and Tyler Klang. For more on
this and lots of other curious topics, visit how stuffworks

(03:14):
dot com. Brainstuff is production of I heart Radio. For
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