Insects & others · plate 57 of 60
Praying Mantis
Mantis religiosa
Patient, polite, and entirely prepared to eat you.
Only 1.4% of people are Praying Mantises. (estimated)
If you're a Praying Mantis
You hold still, you watch, and when you move it is already over. You are solitary to the bone, bold when it counts, and you have no particular need for other people's approval or, in some seasons, their continued existence. You are more observant than anyone realizes; you can look over your own shoulder. You do.
The praying mantis is the only insect known to turn its head and look over its own shoulder.
The Praying Mantis as a spirit animal
You are composed, decisive and faintly unnerving, the person who said nothing for the whole meeting and then settled it in one sentence. You do not need company and you do not pretend to. The flaw is that patience with a purpose looks a great deal like coldness, and sometimes is. A mantis prays with its forelegs folded. It is not praying. It is waiting for something to come within reach.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Praying Mantis
Do
- Approach where they can see you; they prefer to know.
- Give them a vantage point and a long silence.
- Ask one precise question; they strike at precision.
Don't
- Don't fidget. Movement is what they notice, and what they eat.
- Don't expect warmth after the first date.
When it goes wrong: A threatened mantis rears up, spreads its wings and shows the inside of its forelegs; it's a bluff worth respecting, so step back and stop waving.
The Praying Mantis in a relationship
You are selective, slow to approach and alarming to date, in that your partners never quite know how the evening will end. You do not bond; you encounter. The honest version is that you prefer to be alone before, during and after, and love is a brief exception. Everyone survives, usually.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 0
- Boldness
- 8
- Energy
- 2
- Curiosity
- 5
- Devotion
- 0
- Roaming
- 1
- A mantis has a single ear, on the underside of its body between the legs, tuned to the ultrasound of hunting bats.
- It is the only insect so far shown to see in 3D, judging distance with two eyes the way we do.
- Females sometimes eat the male during or after mating; the male can finish without his head.
Praying Mantises in literature
- The mantis stalking the cicada — Garden of Stories (Shuoyuan), Liu Xiang (17 BCE)
- The mantis blocking the chariot — Zhuangzi, Zhuang Zhou (300 BCE)
- The Mantis — Souvenirs entomologiques, volume 5, Jean-Henri Fabre (1897)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Praying Mantis's. If you got Praying Mantis, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other insects & others
Among the 60
Popular Science Monthly, Popular Science Monthly (1890). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
