Praying Mantis

The main character of this story is a praying mantis (mantis religiosa).  The mantis is a carnivorous animal, meaning that it eats other bugs like moths, crickets, grasshoppers and sometimes even its own species.  It is called a praying mantis because its front legs have a shape that makes them look like they are in prayer.  These animals are well camouflaged and are usually green or brown.  Growing up near Chicago Erin Anderson very rarely saw praying mantids.  She remembers one summer seeing two of them together on top of our shed in the back yard; they were beautiful.  The supporting characters of the story are her brother (Eric), our neighbors and the school Eric was going to.  Their neighbors were on vacation in Tennessee over Thanksgiving when they discovered a praying mantis nest in a tree.  They cut it down, put it in a mason jar and thought that Eric would like to take it to school since they were studying bugs.  A week before Christmas break, Eric took it into his classroom where they studied it and left it in the room over Christmas break.  When the teachers got back into the classroom after break, the 4^th grade room had been overrun with baby praying mantids.  Yep, the nest hatched.  Each nest contains 100-200 babies.  Not thinking that the nest was still “alive”, they didn’t have a lid on the jar.  So with oxygen and a warm atmosphere, the nest hatched.  The mantids were everywhere, even falling onto the desks from the ceiling.  The janitors came and vacuumed up the mantids but no vacuum in the world could vacuum up the now infamous story of the praying mantis infestation.

Jessica Gibbons-Rauch also has a memory of a praying mantis.  Before a church picnic, her Grandma Irma found a praying mantis and picked it up.  Irma began talking to it, saying how beautiful it was.  She tried to get Jessica to talk to it as well but Jessica refused.