Yes mantises are voracious predators, I also know the big ones in Africa, every rainy season the grass in abandoned or uncut gardens is host to large numbers of tiny, tiny baby mantises, about the size of the nail on a little finger, we used to let them walk on our hands. Also baby chameleons, very small catching the baby mantises.
The big grown up mantises are dangerous and will go for you if you try anything with them.
I once bought a huge Chameleon off an African who was going round the neighborhood trying to sell it. 5 shillings I think.
It's the biggest one I've ever seen by far, absolutely massive, like a prehistoric one, its claws were squeezing the skin on my arms into hummocks and hurting me , its huge head was by my hand and back part of its body by my elbow with its tail hanging down towards the ground. I went to put it by a tree and it virtually ran up the tree, never saw it again.
Don't know what it might have been eating to get that big, at least three times the size of any chameleon I have ever seen before or since.
The big grown up mantises are dangerous and will go for you if you try anything with them.
I once bought a huge Chameleon off an African who was going round the neighborhood trying to sell it. 5 shillings I think.
It's the biggest one I've ever seen by far, absolutely massive, like a prehistoric one, its claws were squeezing the skin on my arms into hummocks and hurting me , its huge head was by my hand and back part of its body by my elbow with its tail hanging down towards the ground. I went to put it by a tree and it virtually ran up the tree, never saw it again.
Don't know what it might have been eating to get that big, at least three times the size of any chameleon I have ever seen before or since.
It's not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable. The hundred-times-refuted theory of "free will" owes its persistence to this charm alone; some one is always appearing who feels himself strong enough to refute it - Friedrich Nietzsche