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Insect identification anyone? / insect photos


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Your mantis is the introduced South African one, slowly spreading south and displacing the natives. I didn't know they could change colour, but there definitely is a fair bit of colour variation amongst them, on a continuum from brown to green.

The native mantis is quite straight-bodied, with a thorax a similar width to the abdomen (not waisted like your girl), is a solid dark green with bold blue ears on the inside of the forelimbs.

Sad to say I have never seen a native mantis, only the South African one. I've seen other colours before but knew they could change colour, which is what surprised me about this one. Especially since the leaves of the plants are almost all green and there haven't been any lemons in it for quite some time. I'm glad it seems to like the tree, I always wanted a praying mantis as a pet but they only seem to eat live food they catch so they're not the easiest bugs to keep.

Also thanks to whoever said masonry bee. I googled them and they look and sound about right since they return year after year!

As for stick insects, I still see them from time to time. Last time I saw one it was HUGE. I swear it looked around 15cm long sitting very exposed on the side of my house. Hope it didn't get gobbled. They are incredibly cool.

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I hear the females can reproduce on their own anyway. Who need men :P?

A friend of mine did her PHD on stick insects. :happy2:

The females undergo mitosis and cell divide to breed! That's insane isn't it! :nilly:

She also found a new type of stick insect with a different number of chromosomes than the norm. THe NI and SI stick insects are also different, I think it's the SI ones that undergo mitosis to multiply.

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Yeah, not all native stick insect reproduce by parthenogenesis (roughly 'virgin birth', no males required). I think some species do it if there are no males around, and some species almost never produce any males so do it parthenogenetically as a rule.

Occasionally things go wrong with egg production and a 'virgin' can create a male, but this is rare.

(Insects don't do the X and Y chromosome for sex assignment like us, they have various other ways of doing it. For ants/wasps/bees etc, fertilised eggs with two sets of chromosomes (one from mum, one from dad) make female offspring, while unfertilised eggs (just one set of chromosomes from mum) create boys. This means a male can have daughters but not sons, but he can have grandsons.... :nilly: )

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For ants/wasps/bees etc, fertilised eggs with two sets of chromosomes (one from mum, one from dad) make female offspring, while unfertilised eggs (just one set of chromosomes from mum) create boys. This means a male can have daughters but not sons, but he can have grandsons.... :nilly: )
It gets even weirder than that with dihaploid offspring of bees (I guess ants/wasps etc can do the same).

Male bee, one mother, no father, one grandmother and possibly two grandfathers :o

Bee genetics is cool and slightly strange.

15 years of beekeeping

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blueether - yes, all ants/bees/wasp species do the same trick. So seriously weird! I had to do a 10,000 word essay on reproduction in ants last year, it did my head in!

(ants/bees/wasps are all part of one big happy family called Hymenoptera, which means 'skin-wing', after their transparent wings.)

Bees are just amazing! My dad used to have a couple of hives. Managed to make the whole family phobic (shudder) but I still find them fascinating.

If you are interested in social insects, try looking up our native batflies - weirdest fly in existence!

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I used to keep stick insects as a kid in England and as far as I know I had a male and female and they used to breed. The male was smaller and he used to stick the end of his sticky end into or onto the end of her sticky end and then round eggs with a dot on top would follow later on the floor of the jar.

If that wasn't stickies getting sticky I don't know what they were up to. They survived on privet I used to pick from the council walkway.

Once I took a bunch of juveniles in to science class for I don't know what purpose, they disappeared and some days later we found 'some stick insects' in a jar with the other dead critters and pigs eyes :o

The brown one in Mark's picture looks like a female, they are always fatter around the belly.

When I lived on Waiheke Island there was a lot of bush on the section and we frequently found stick insects in the bushes and on the car, which was parked under some trees. Once we drove the car to the ferry, got out and found 2 of them on the car. Went to Auckland, came back and they were still there so we drove them home again.

What identifies the mantis in the latest picture as the type from SA - the big belly? We have usually had both those type and the skinny green type, I thought the smaller one was a male and the fat belly a female :oops:

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What identifies the mantis in the latest picture as the type from SA - the big belly? We have usually had both those type and the skinny green type, I thought the smaller one was a male and the fat belly a female :oops:
The lack of a blue dot on the inside of the forelegs.
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  • 2 weeks later...
anyone know what these are? fly pupa of some sort or ..

pupa.jpg

found in the foot hills. under a rock, ants were gathering them up and taking into their tunnels :o

The queen ant will be horrified to find out she's laying fly eggs...

p12813nsil.jpg

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