{"id":4764,"date":"2015-10-23T22:38:49","date_gmt":"2015-10-24T03:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/?p=4764"},"modified":"2015-10-23T22:38:49","modified_gmt":"2015-10-24T03:38:49","slug":"uh-oh-we-could-have-a-lot-more-mouths-to-feed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/?p=4764","title":{"rendered":"Uh oh … we could have a LOT more mouths to feed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mantie_7407\"<\/a>My youngest boy catches the strangest things as if it’s second nature.\u00a0 That’s why I was elated but not altogether surprised when he brought home Mantie the praying mantis.\u00a0 She’s huge, ferocious, and entertaining.\u00a0 We even let her spend a few days at the boys’ dentist’s office, where I’m told she was a big hit.\u00a0 And now she’s about to have company.<\/p>\n

As you can see in the photo above, she’s just laid an enormous egg sac.\u00a0 We suspected this was coming; she’d been blimping out like crazy since we got her.\u00a0 Male mantises are much smaller than Mantie, and often don’t survive the mating process, so I had no doubt that Mantie was a girl.\u00a0 Whether or not she was going to lay eggs was another matter.\u00a0 Finding a praying mantis in North Dakota is rare enough; what are the odds of that mantis getting a date<\/strong>?<\/p>\n

I’m told that there could be upwards of 200 little Manties in there.\u00a0 While I’m okay with keeping a cricket farm for Mantie’s nutritional needs, I have no idea where I can get aphids – especially enough to feed a dinner part of 200 – so I’m planning on stashing the egg sac out by the water behind our house.\u00a0 It should ride out just fine until Spring, and then maybe I’ll have an army of mantises to take care of mosquitoes.\u00a0 Wouldn’t that be cool?<\/p>\n

The trick now is to get the egg sac outside in the cold so it doesn’t hatch.\u00a0 Otherwise the warm indoor air will trigger something for which we’re entirely unprepared.\u00a0 Yikes!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My youngest boy catches the strangest things as if it’s second nature.\u00a0 That’s why I was elated but not altogether surprised when he brought home Mantie the praying mantis.\u00a0 She’s huge, ferocious, and entertaining.\u00a0 We even let her spend a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cool","category-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4764"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4765,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4764\/revisions\/4765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bismarckmandanblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}