\ Posted on 12/22/2021 11:15:53 AM PST by Red Badger
\
'Tis the season when people bring a tree indoors and apparently discover they are harboring praying mantis eggs.
According to a Facebook post by Officials in Erie County, Ohio, that is once again being spread around the Internet, if you see a strange walnut-like growth on the tree, you should not bring it indoors.
"PSA: If you happen to see a walnut-sized/shaped egg mass, on your Christmas tree, don’t fret, clip the branch and put it in your garden. These are 100-200 praying mantis eggs!" they wrote in the post. "Don’t bring them inside they will hatch and starve!"
This advice, of course, applies only to people living in areas with praying mantises.
The danger is to the praying mantises themselves. The creatures are quite harmless to anyone other than their prey, which we — thankfully — are not.
They are unlikely to pose any danger to humans, even with their rare, venomless bites, and do not carry disease.
The mantis, meanwhile, would be in serious danger of a lack of food were they to find themselves transported into a nice, cozy, insect-free living room for Christmas. Ohio officials suggest that you just cut off the branch and place it outside, before you witness up to 200 praying mantises crawling out of their eggs.
So if you see these growths on the tree, as the officials suggest, please do not bring them indoors.
video at link......................
Years ago, the kids of a friend of mine put one of those in a kitchen cabinet drawer
He got up the next morning and there were hundreds of baby mantis all over the kitchen
I bet Mom freaked out!....................
That's what I've done when I find them. There good for the garden.
Praying Mantises kill Hummingbirds.
Used to buy praying mantis cocoons from Burpee Seeds for the garden.
Oh yeah
That, I didn’t know
We used to bring those inside all the time as kids. We had a couple bay windows with indoor plants. It was so cool watching them hatch and then eat each other.
The first day they hatch, there are hundreds of tiny ones less than a quarter inch long. The next day there are maybe ten or twenty, about a half inch long.
The third or fourth day, only one or two big ones.
If you haven’t ever done this, you are depriving yourself and your children of an amazing lesson from nature.
To paraphrase the late John Candy:
“Those Aren’t Pine Cones!!!”
Everything in nature spends every waking hour killing something or attempting to expand its habitat at the expense of every other living thing.
There was a similar incident at an apartment building I lived in in the 80’s.
The guy across the hall from me brought in an old couch that had been in his Aunt’s barn. It was in pretty good shape too. He really liked it until the wolf spider eggs - somewhere deep inside it - hatched. They little ba-—rds and ran amok all through the building.
Nobody could get their girlfriends to stop over for weeks.
Used to work at Midway airport near Chicago. Southwest flights from Texas would routinely carry many stowaway praying mantis, and they were gigantic.
They kill black widow spiders.
Why? Are they racists?............................
Don’t the females of both species eat their respective males?
Could we let a couple of those loose in Chicago?
Gardening ping
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