Almost nothing is worse than realizing you have tons of pests in your garden. It might seem like a praying mantis is nothing but another type of pest, but they can actually be quite helpful. There are multiple reasons why you should consider having a praying mantis in your garden.
Why should I have a praying mantis in my garden? A praying mantis is an insect, but it’s also a predator. Praying mantises feed on other insects, so they can rid a garden of annoying pests. However, they will eat almost anything, so that means they will also eat some beneficial insects.
If you want to grow a beautiful, full garden, you may want to consider adding praying mantises to it. These insects are carnivorous, so they won’t eat your plants, but they will eat other insects. That means they can keep other bugs from messing with your hard work.
The Insect That Eats Other Insects
Before we can determine the best reasons to have praying mantises in a garden, we need to know what they are. At the most basic level, praying mantises are insects that prey on other insects. However, there’s a bit more to these predators than meets the eye.
- Praying mantises eat almost any insect or bug that comes their way. This includes everything from flies to ladybugs.
- If the need for food is high, praying mantises eat each other to stay alive. They aren’t picky at all when it comes to finding food.
- These predatory insects live in gardens all over, and they especially love gardens with shrubs. Females can lay their eggs in shrubs to keep them safe from predators while the eggs mature.
- Since they eat any insect, they are a good option for gardens with a lot of bad pests. However, they will also eat good insects.
When deciding if you want to add praying mantises to your garden, you should consider some good reasons to add them. Of course, these insects aren’t perfect for all gardens. However, they can help you maintain a pest-free garden for years to come.
Praying mantises have a lot going for them that make great garden predators, but they’re not without their flaws. If you want to learn more about adding praying mantises to your garden, click here.
Reason 1: They Are Big
Praying mantises are much bigger than your average garden insect. They can measure about half an inch at their smallest. At their largest, they can measure as long as six inches.
Their heads are on a long thorax, or neck. They can use their size to move around a garden and prey on insects. Some adult praying mantises will even feast on bigger pests, like rodents or frogs.
The praying mantis will eat smaller insects as well as larger insects, too. Also, their size makes it so that praying mantises can easily find and catch their prey. They can move around a garden quickly, and since they often live in groups, they can cover a larger area.
If you add praying mantises to your garden, you will have a large yet unobtrusive insect that can be beneficial. Yet, despite their size, they aren’t always noticeable to their prey. You can read this article from National Geographic to learn more about the size and profile of praying mantises.
Reason 2: They Use Camouflage
Some predators are so large that they can stalk their prey in the open, and the prey won’t have a chance. While a praying mantis is bigger than other insects, it uses camouflage to stay hidden while looking for food. Praying mantises are usually green or brown, and both colors fit in well with many gardens.
- Camouflage helps praying mantises stay out of sight of their prey. That way, they can watch the other insects without fear of the insect running away.
- Praying mantises have bodies that also look similar to plants, which can help them stay concealed while on the hunt.
- While praying mantises would be great hunters without camouflage, that extra layer of protection helps them catch even more prey.
- Staying camouflaged also helps praying mantises to sit and wait for prey to come to them, rather than having to search for prey. They don’t have to rummage through your garden just to find food.
Praying mantises aren’t the only predators that use camouflage to hunt. However, it gives them a particular advantage as they can sit in a garden and wait. They don’t have to go out and search for prey unless there happens to be a shortage of insects.
Reason 3: They Have Great Vision
Another benefit that praying mantises have for them and your garden is that they can see pests from up to 60 feet away. At that distance, they can see even the slightest movements, so insects don’t have to get that close for a praying mantis to notice something. Their vision helps them find more prey without having to move around and potentially ruin your garden.
Praying mantises also have the benefit of flexible heads. A mantis can move its head up to 180 degrees in either direction. Combined, that gives it the ability to move its head a full 360 degrees, so they can see in any direction without moving their body.
They have two “compound” eyes as well as three “simple” eyes between the two other eyes. Those five eyes help praying mantises see and catch prey from almost any angle. Their excellent vision helps them find prey in your garden without having to search and move through every possible plant.
Even if a praying mantis doesn’t sit in the middle of your garden, their fantastic field of vision can help them catch prey all over. If you have a small garden, you may only need a couple of mantises to keep your garden pest-free.
Reason 4: They Have Good Hearing
Along with good sight, many predators need a good hearing to find and catch prey. Luckily, the praying mantis has a sense of hearing good enough for them to find other insects in your garden and to keep themselves safe from larger predators.
- Praying mantises only have one ear, which might seem paltry compared to the two ears we humans have.
- That single ear can make it hard for mantises to detect the source of a sound, but they don’t necessarily need that information, thanks to their sight.
- The good news is that they have ultrasonic hearing. That means praying mantises can avoid bats, which might want to eat the mantises.
- Ultrasonic hearing can also help mantises hear other sounds that we might not be able to detect. That can come in handy when protecting your garden.
While its hearing isn’t the biggest strength of a praying mantis, it is a good reason to have them in your garden. Mantises help keep your garden free from pests, and their hearing can help them find and eat those harmful insects. At night, they can even use their ultrasonic hearing to detect and hide from bats, thus keeping the mantis population alive.
Reason 5: They Move Fast
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise due to how big they can get, but praying mantises can move quickly. Not only can they see and hear prey many feet away, but they can get to those prey in the blink of an eye. Their speed also helps them get away from potential predators, like those bats they can hear.
A praying mantis can jump as far as one or two body lengths away at one time. For a six-inch mantis, that means up to a foot of movement. As they jump, they can remain somewhat camouflaged, though some insects might detect the movement. However, many insects can’t move fast enough to avoid the mantis completely.
Praying mantises can catch their prey by jumping quickly around your garden. That means if they see an insect, they can get there in an instant and go in for a bite to eat. Their quick speed can help save your plants from some harmful insects.
Now, some mantises may not be able to get from one side of a garden to the other that quickly. But when your garden is on the smaller side, they can keep an eye on everything. If you tend to get a lot of pests in your garden, adding just a few mantises can help to keep those problems at bay.
Reason 6: They Have Short Reaction Times
Not only can praying mantises move fast, but they can react just as fast, too. Combine that with their ability to see and hear things on the other side of your garden, and a mantis can attack and kill pests within seconds. Their reaction time can be much shorter than some common garden pests.
- Believe it or not, a praying mantis’s reaction time is about half that of a housefly. That means a mantis can react twice as fast as that pesky fly.
- Of course, this quick reaction time sets them up as the perfect predator for other insects in your garden. That can keep your garden safe from those pests.
- However, the short reaction time also helps mantises stay alive. While they are predators, they also have predators. So, reacting quickly is essential for moving out of reach of their own predators.
- To get technical, one study found that mantises can react to the presence of a bat within 260 to 400 milliseconds. That same quickness can apply when the mantis is hunting its own prey within your garden.
A mantis’s ability to react quickly to different stimuli helps it as both a predator and prey. As a predator, it can act quickly to catch any insects that pass by or approach your garden. And as prey, it can quickly move to safety when it detects a bat or other predator.
That quick movement helps it stay alive so it can keep doing its job as a beneficial insect in your garden. But the benefits don’t stop there. There are still more good reasons to keep praying mantises in your garden.
Reason 7: They Have the Perfect Lifespan
Typically, the growing season lasts from the spring to the fall. Luckily, our friend the praying mantis lives through one growing season before it leaves eggs for the next year. That’s right–the growing period is just long enough for mantis eggs to hatch and for mantises to live and reproduce.
At the beginning of the growing season, praying mantis eggs left the prior season will hatch. These hatchlings will start off eating smaller prey, and they will grow throughout the season. As they grow, they will start to eat bigger prey, sometimes even prey larger than themselves.
During the growing season, praying mantises will mate with each other. This is when the female will typically bite off the male’s head. That way, the male won’t eat the female, so the female can survive until she lays the eggs later.
Near the end of the growing season, the female will lay her eggs. She will look for shrubs or other covered areas so that the eggs don’t get eaten. After the long growing season, the adult mantis will die, and the cycle will repeat in the following spring.
That life cycle makes praying mantises perfect for many gardens. Odds are, you probably don’t focus too much on gardening in the winter. And even if you do, some garden pests aren’t active in the colder weather, so praying mantises aren’t needed.
Reason 8: They Eat Garden Pests
Of course, the best reason of all for having praying mantises is their diet. As we’ve mentioned, mantises eat anything and everything, at least when it comes to other insects. That can help you keep your garden safe from bad insects that can eat your plants and ruin your garden.
- A common garden pest is an aphid. Aphids are shaped like pears and have antennae and tubes projecting out. They can suck up plant sap, which can cause leaves to drop.
- Caterpillars may mature into butterflies, but before that, they can destroy your garden. They feast on leaves or along margins of plants, and they can tunnel into fruits.
- Cutworms can chew through stems at the ground level. In the late spring and early summer, they can even eat entire small plants.
There are many other problematic garden pests out there, and praying mantises will eat all of them. If you see any common pests, adding mantises can help you get rid of those harmful insects. You can learn more about some common bad garden insects here.
How to Get Praying Mantises
If you’ve decided you want or need praying mantises in your garden, you have to get some. The good news is that there are a couple of different ways you can get these beneficial predators. Let’s look at the two main methods for acquiring mantises.
- In many cases, the easiest way to get praying mantises is to buy cages of eggs from a supplier. You can put the cage in your garden at the start of the season, and they will eventually hatch and turn into full-grown praying mantises.
- You can also try to attract praying mantises to your garden naturally. Mantises like to lay eggs in shrubs, so adding a shrub or two can help. Before you buy eggs, you should check your garden to see if there are mantises, especially if you have shrubs, to keep from adding too many.
While there are many great reasons to have praying mantises in your garden, you have to get the mantises, too. Whether you buy eggs from a supplier or attract grown mantises, you can easily get a growing population of the insect. If you want to learn more about where mantises like to live and breed, click here.
When Not to Get Praying Mantises
Despite the many good reasons to have a praying mantis or two in your garden, there are times when they can do more harm than good. Before you rush to buy mantis eggs, consider the current population of insects in your garden. Remember, praying mantises eat all insects, and that includes good ones.
If your garden attracts pollinators, like bees and hummingbirds, rethink the idea of praying mantises. Mantises will feed on even the most helpful insects, so they could even eat all of the insects that come to pollinate your plants. This can be especially important to think about if you have a lot of flowers that need pollination from insects.
Other beneficial insects include ladybugs, which eat aphids; and ground beetles, which eat caterpillars and cutworms. While praying mantises are beneficial insects, they will eat other beneficial insects, so they’re best for getting rid of garden pests. If you want to learn more about other beneficial insects to have in your garden, this link has some great information.
Final Thoughts
Praying mantises are strange yet cool because they will eat any insect that comes their way. They also have some amazing traits that make them good garden hunters. However, you should make sure they’d make a good fit before you add them to your garden.