Praying Mantis Attack!
Okay so no one was injured and I even managed to avoid burning breakfast. This morning I found an itty bitty tiny baby praying mantis on our kitchen counter. Weird, I thought and carefully scooped it up and carried it outside. I continued making breakfast.
I went to rinse off a dish in the sink and ack, there were a dozen baby praying mantises (manti?) on the kitchen window. Okay... So I knocked them all into a plastic container and took them outside too. One is coincidence, a dozen there's got to be a source.
Zach's pine tree he brought home from school that had been sitting on the kitchen counter next to the sink (pictured outside):
See the weird pine cone shaped thing that's not really a pine cone? (I circled it in yellow to be helpful.) It's a mantis ootheca (egg sac). Learn something new every day, huh?
While I rescued a few dozen, I'm worried about the 5 that my kids have adopted as pets. We don't have any fruit flies to feed them so the kids have decided that ants are the next best thing. And since they are so tiny (see my next picture), I think the kids may now just have pet ants.
(Yeah the pine tree itself isn't doing so hot either. There goes my theory that plants next to the sink live longer.)
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