Tricked by a bug

   

     Not to give women any ideas ... but praying mantises do not always need a male in order to reproduce.
      Sure, they can do it the standard birds-and-bees way, with male praying mantises famously being eaten by the female after serving their purpose. And usually, they do. But females can also reproduce through parthenogenesis, laying eggs that are clones of herself, without needing to  bother with the annoyance of involving a male, and all the drama that entails.
     And yes, the female occasionally eats their special friend after copulation. This happens mostly in captivity though, where males have been seen continuing to mate even with their heads gone, which is also par for the course. Though the nymphs — young mantises — also eat each other, and mantises are so generally voracious that they inspired a rare bit of wordplay in the no-nonsense Encyclopaedia Britannica, which ends its entry for mantids (a variant they prefer to "mantis"): "Since all mantids are ferocious carnivores, 'preying' rather than 'praying' may better describe them.") Touche!
     I spied this fine specimen on our doorpost Wednesday morning.
     "Hello gorgeous," I said. "Where have you been all summer?"
     She hadn't been there the evening before — at nearly four inches long, I could hardly have missed her at eye level — but then praying mantises are crepuscular (coming out at twilight) and nocturnal. She probably showed up in the night. I was surprised to see her — it's been getting a little cold for such an ectothermic (drawing heat from the outside rather than generating it from within; I know people like that) creature.
     I admired how still she stood as I snapped her portrait — I assumed it was a female, who had just laid her eggs, in a protective egg case called an ootheca, a lovely word that seems to have a pair of eggs right there in the beginning, coined by 19th century science, turning to the Greek, of course, ōon meaning egg, and thēkē meaning container. (Ootheke is ovary in Greek; mantis is straight Greek, for "prophet," which enhances the praying part).
     It was only later, when I passed by our doorpost a second time, did I remember the iron fist that nature hides within the velvet glove of all that beauty. My mantis wasn't holding still; she was dead. 

     Or so I thought. I returned later in the morning, thinking I would collect the corpse and perhaps deposit it on a shelf in my office, as a wintertime companion. But she was gone. I looked on the ground, figuring she had fallen off. No mantis. Maybe a bird got her.

      Then I noticed her, a few inches down, head facing earthward. Front arms definitely wiggling with life. And I remembered that mantises — and there are nearly 2,000 kinds, the praying mantis is only the most familiar — are mimics, imitating flowers, leaves, stems, blades of grass. There are orchid mantises and stick mantises, dead leaf mantises and mantises that mimic ants.  They blend in. 

     I'd been fooled. By an animal with a brain the size of a mustard seed, one that can carry on a meaningful romantic life with its head bitten off. I smiled, admiringly, and wished her well as she carried on with her Wednesday, and I continued with mine.