What’s wrong with those men? It’s a green, pretty insect that doesn’t bite. I see lots of them in my garden, and they’re usually ingeniously camouflaged. Sometimes you have to look closely to recognize them, because they disguise themselves as flowers, dead leaves and bird turds. And they are amazingly intelligent, as bugs go. I think they’re extraterrestrials.
Fear of insects is psychological / genetic.
For the same people, you could place a sterile, non-venomous and non-biting insect on their body and their brain would light up with the stress response of the kind one would see when confronted by a lion in the wild.
I've always thought so too. Just moved a baby one off of my bar-b-que to a nearby plant yesterday.
I agree in re: the reaction to the single praying mantis...
But, when I was 15 years old, I got my first job which involved FICA and SS deductions. The job was sweeping floors at a large textile factory. The job also required that you perform various other tasks as assigned... The factory had beed expanded several times over the years and the expansions had created little “court yards” surrounded by four concrete block walls, accessable through only one door. We had to go into these areas and cut the grass. There was one area about 30’ x 50’, that had become infested completely with a huge praying mantis population. Thousands of them... It was like something Stephen King would have written back in the day. And we had to clean them out. No kidding, I saw one that was at least 15” long. Multi-colored, too. Green, brown, and an orange-yellow. I will tell you that if you walk into that size swarm, you will definitely get creeped out. They would be all over you. One of my co-workers quit. Another made a flame thrower from a garden sprayer and went to war with them. The mantis population took a huge hit that day.
Here in southern New Jersey(’’ the shore area’’ where I live) we have the green colored species, beautiful little buggers, well, they’re big actually. My wife loves them because they eat the bugs that go after her rose bushes and her other plants. I’ve always thought they’re just about the coolest looking insects going.( They’re from the family of beetles, the most numerous of insects species.) Funny thing about this picture to me is that the mantis I always see don’t have black eyes. They’re a kind of light brown or beige.