(Note: This entry's about giant bugs. You should probably go look at this
video of a kitten instead.)
When I was still in elementary school and going to pow-wows every summer, our vehicle was my dad's one-eyed gold Jeep with a front end that was at least 40% duct tape. It wasn't much to look at, but it did the job... pretty admirably, to be honest, considering that "the job" was hauling us and several hundred pounds of camping equipment, food, and jewelry making supplies through grass, mud, rocks, and worse.
It should probably be completely unsurprising that this car ended up coming into contact with all kinds of interesting wildlife on the way.
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| Image from Wikipedia.org. |
At some point, a pregnant praying mantis got into it. We didn't know how, or why, or even when... All the evidence we had was the fact that, some time later, the entire Jeep was overrun with very tiny mantises. Mantises which my dad was convinced we couldn't do anything about, since (he said) New York state pins a $500 fine on anyone who kills one.
It made riding around very interesting.
At one point, I got it into my head that a Jeep full of cigarette boxes and the remains of fallen french fries probably wasn't the most natural environment for these guys. One day, on the way home from my grandmother's house, I managed to catch one. It was about the size of the end of my thumb, all bug eyes and angular limbs, and I cupped my hands around it for the whole ride, gingerly moving with every bump and bend in the road to keep from hurting the tiny creature.
It's not easy to make a suitable terrarium for something that small (especially when your materials are more or less limited to things like neon Play-Doh, Lego, and cat hair). I improvised as best as I could, filling a styrofoam coffee cup with twigs and grass clippings, and covering it with a bit of tinfoil with holes poked in it. I set my new pet inside, and crouched down in the hallway with a stack of encyclopedias so I could figure out what to feed it.
As it turned out, other bugs.
Where the hell was I going to get bugs? Any feeder cricket would outweigh this mantis dozens of times over, and, if I suddenly asked my mother if we could go to the pet store to get some, I'd also have to tell her that I was keeping a smuggled-in car mantis stashed in my bedroom.
No.
Okay, Plan B-- I went outside to see if I could find some bugs. I didn't have a butterfly net, so I brought the net I used for my goldfish and tried swiping gnats out of the air.
Needless to say, this met with markedly little success, and quite a lot of frustration and scabbed knees.
Disheartened, I sat on my stoop and watched the little brown ants scurrying around my feet.
They looked small enough, and there were tons of them... but how the hell was I going to pick them up and get them into my styrofoam mantishouse? I needed some way to attract them, hopefully snare them long enough so I wouldn't have to hang around ant hills all afternoon, and make them easy to pick up.
Then I had a brilliant idea.
For the next week or so, I constantly begged my mom for bubble gum. I told her I didn't like the sugarless stuff-- I needed the real deal. Twice a day, I'd go outside, sit on my stoop, and chew the shit out of a mouthful of gum. Once it was gooey enough (but still had plenty of Bubble Yum Cotton Candy flavor) I pulled it out of my mouth, stretched it into thin strings, and stuck it down in the cracks of the sidewalk where the brown ants lived.
Then I waited.
After fifteen minutes or so, I'd go back and I'd pick my strands of ABC gum out of the sidewalk. With a pair of tweezers, I'd carefully pick off the ants unfortunate enough to have gotten stuck to the sweet, gooey mass, and stick them in the cup. The ants would wander up and down the sides until one or two would get too close to wherever the tiny mantis was hiding. There'd be a flurry of activity, and (like some kind of monster out of a science fiction movie) the mantis would dart out, snare one of the ants, and retreat back to eat it.
It was pretty much the coolest/creepiest thing I'd ever seen at that point in my young life.
I didn't keep my mantis for very long. I fed it religiously for a few days, before I realized I was going to need a much, much bigger house for it (and a much, much bigger budget for gum). It was released into my grandpa's garden, and I quietly disposed of the cup, grass clippings, and tinfoil lid.
Years later, I still have kind of a fascination with mantises. I mean, just
look at them.
