If giant rainforest mantises went to kindergarten, little girl mantises wouldn’t look any bigger and stronger than the little boy mantises. Not until the end of mantis high school would lady mantises become the bigger sex. Then, female hunting strikes become more forceful than those of males.
The first series of measurements of this mantis’s predatory strike force from teensy insects-to-adulthood clarifies when hers and his power strikes diverge, a team from Kiel University in Germany reports in the March Physiological Entomology. The researchers now have a new unanswered question, though. Mantises, especially adult females, wallop the test apparatus harder than predicted based on a key muscle’s size, says