Animal · France, Spain, Italy
Praying mantis
Mantis religiosa — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The praying mantis holds its spiny front legs folded as if praying, then snaps them shut on a fly in a fraction of a second. While it waits, it can turn its head far enough to look right over its own shoulder.
Picture credit: Charles J. Sharp (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Rouibi Dhia Eddine Nadjm (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Syrio (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the praying mantis live?
Home: sunny meadows, hedges and gardens.
In the wild it lives in these countries: France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Greece, Türkiye, Morocco, the United States.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 5–8 cm (European mantis). It weighs about 0 003 kilograms. On the menu: insects.
The story behind it
A mantis hunts by waiting. It stands without moving among the leaves, its triangular head turning to follow every flicker, and only its two big eyes give it away. The neck is unusually bendy: it swings the head close to 180 degrees, which hardly any other insect can do. Underneath the body, between the back legs, sits a single ear right on the middle line, not a pair. That strange ear picks up very high sounds, the calls of hunting bats, so a mantis in flight can drop away before it is caught. Females glue their eggs into a foam that dries into a tough case called an ootheca. In spring dozens of mantises the size of a pinhead climb out of it at once.
Find it on the globe
Praying mantis is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How big does a praying mantis get?
The European mantis reaches 6 to 8 cm as a female and a little less as a male. Tropical kinds range from thumbnail size to about 17 cm, and many look like leaves, flowers or bark.
Where do praying mantises live?
In warm and mild parts of the world, in meadows, hedges, scrub and gardens. The European mantis is at home around the Mediterranean and is slowly spreading north as summers grow warmer.
Why does a mantis have only one ear?
Its ear lies in a deep groove on the middle of its underside and listens for the ultrasound of bats. A single ear cannot tell left from right, but it does not need to: the message is simply 'a bat is near', and then the mantis dives.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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