[escepticos] Mantis

[Carlos Gonzalia <gonzalia@...>]

Estaba leyendo uno de mis web sites favoritos, la pagina de leyendas
urbanas de la San Fernando Velly Folklore Society, y me encontre con
esta interesante aclaracion sobre la conducta de estos insectos durante
el apareamiento. Siempre se aprende algo nuevo...

    Claim:   Female praying mantises always eat the heads of their mates. 

    Status:   False. 

    Example:   [Newsday, 1993] 

           The praying mantis, with its forelegs folded as if in prayer,
           may look pious, but its mating ritual is truly a macabre
           affair: Once the smaller male is attached to the female's body,
           she decapitates him, but he continues the act of conjugation
           for several more days before he dies and is eaten
           by his voracious mate. 

    Origins:   For a very long time it was believed that not only did the
    female praying mantis consume the head (and sometimes the rest) of her
    mate during copulation, but that this grisly act was a necessary part
    of the reproductive process. (The reasons given for this act of
    decapitation included its being a signal to the male to release his
    sperm, its providing the female with protein required for her to
    produce more eggs, and its being a way of keeping the male from leaving
    prematurely.) Even though this notion has long since been
    disproved, the legend of the deadly female persists. 

    In a research project whose results were published in the journal Animal
    Behaviour in 1984, entomologists Eckehard Liske and W. Jackson Davis made
    videotapes of the sex lives of thirty pairs of praying mantises. They
    discovered that mantises engage in elaborate posturing rituals before
    mating, but not one of the thirty males had his head eaten during the
    mating process. They also noted that other scientists had observed the same
    thing: Although female mantises sometimes ate their mates, the deadly act
    by no means occurred in every case. The behavior appeared to be mostly an
    artifact of captivity: Female mantises were either jarred into unusually
    aggressive behavior by the unusual laboratory conditions, or they were
    simply not fed enough by their keepers. 

    It may not be the same choice we would make, but given the option of food
    or sex, Ms. Mantis will opt for the former. Nonetheless, in most cases Mr.
    Mantis survives the mating process with his head intact.

    Source:

        Liske, E. and W.J. Davis.   "Sexual Behavior of the Chinese Praying
        Mantis."  Animal Behaviour   (32:916-917, 1984)

    Last updated:   31 October 1999 

    http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/mantis1.htm