Wasp Impersonator Meets the Real Deal, The Mantisfly

In this episode of the Insect Hunter we're going to be taking a look at this awesome mantispid that I was able to catch. We found it in our garden and a few different insects were landing on the leaf and I wanted to show you kind of what happened in these encounters. So mantispids are actually closer related to lacewings than they are to actual praying mantises but they do have very similar features. They have those claws that are like praying mantises and a lot of them are mimics. This one is trying to mimic a wasp and as you can see they're predators but they also will feed on other resources when available. This one's feeding on some honeydew which was produced by some aphids which if you look up you can kind of see all the aphids that were producing the honeydew. So he's stretching and it looks like he's ready so I put a few different insects onto the plant to see what would happen. Here's an aphid and all it really took for him was just to touch it with his antennae to knock it over so I did let the aphid stand there for a little bit and watch here you see he goes in with both of his claws there and just slams the thing and then it rolls down kind of in slow motion. It moves his claws almost so fast that you can't even see it with your naked eye you have to really slow it down. Then here you can kind of see an ant comes on and the aphid kind of distracts him and he tries to take a swipe at it but I think he was more focused on the aphid in the moment so he wasn't really able to deal with the ant so he just kind of flipped over onto the underside of the leaf to kind of hide from the ant which kind of just walked away. But here he goes again with another ant I kind of had him on my finger. Once you actually find these things they're not that hard to catch. This one was just very calm and it allowed me to hold it. Let's watch this in slow motion. I couldn't figure out at first what actually happened I thought he might have thrown him forward but I mean the only way that he could have got him off of the frame that fast was to throw him backward and then with this ant you can see that he clearly is just picking them up and throwing them backward it's pretty awesome. Look at that just kind of dumps it back and almost this mechanical motion it's awesome. Then I decided to see what he would do with the wasp and he actually just flew over to the wasp so this is kind of the thing that he's trying to mimic. The wasp was definitely aware of him and he was aware of the wasp kind of takes a swipe at him tries to hit him but the wasp was able to just knock him right off. Most insects don't even want to fight if they don't have to I mean he just hey knock him off the leaf you don't have to fight. Here he goes again he takes a swipe at that wasp here he comes up from behind this time he was totally surprised and all it takes from the yellow jacket is just to knock him over with his left sorry with his right leg there he just knocks him straight off of the leaf they're very waxy and hard to stay on so the yellow jacket is coming up towards him and he takes a swipe at him and he kind of does a barrel roll over there do a barrel roll that's what I was thinking and the wasp kind of gets distracted by that little fly over there he doesn't really want anyone on these leaves because he wants to be eating the honeydew for himself and and he finally notices oh yeah there's this mantispid still on there. So then the battle ensues he tries to take a bite at him but the mantispid is kind of really just waiting for that opportunity almost like a martial artist to grab onto his body it's cool to watch the wasp kind of put his legs up to try and make himself look more threatening they grab onto each other and the mantispid kind of shakes him around and drags him off like a wrecking ball it's awesome in this fight the wasp kind of gets thrown away but I mean he just flies off anyway so it's not going to affect him that much watch that you see how that wasp tries to go in there with its jaws and just barely misses his face if he'd have got him in the face he could have caused some severe damage but the mantispid keeps putting up a fight using those awesome claws grabs onto him and tries to just kind of throw him off there in slow motion almost looks like they're drunk or something but I mean it's all a really fast fight what's actually happening and he kind of gets him underneath and throws him off and that wasp was really trying to get him with his stinger but wasn't able to pull it off thanks for watching this episode a big thanks to Epikus who does the intros and outros for my videos and who also produced that last song with the fight with the wasp he's got some awesome music so check out his channel and subscribe to my channel so that you can stay tuned next time for all things insects