Papagaios, Life & Times on a Speculative Archipelago

Taken from website of Urban Jungle, an exotic pet shop in Glasgow Scotland. Information uploaded December 2022.

Invertebrates are becoming ever more popular as pets. Stick insects, tarantulas, giant land snails and more are leaping off our shelves as pets contained within terrariums appeal more and more to people living in small flats in busy cities. A popular new addition to the invertebrate pet market are mantishoppers.

Mantishoppers are a genus of grasshopper native to the Papagaios Islands of the Atlantic Ocean. They are part of the saddleback grasshoppers, a carnivourous group unique to the islands. Among this group, mantishoppers are the largest and most unusual.

(This post will continue talking about the three-spot saddleback which we sell in-store, but is broadly true for all mantis hoppers.)

The three-spot saddleback is around 10cm long, not including its back legs which as long as its entire body again. Their front legs include a long grasping claw. It is a fused and elongated form of the tarsus (the normally jointed section at the end of the leg of insects). Both the tarsus and femur are covered in long, sharp spikes to grapple prey - if the saddleback doesn’t use its claw to spear the prey, that is.

Mantishoppers are ambush predators. Sitting still and silent among the leaves, they scan for prey with their big eyes. Their favourite prey are small birds such as the local asdanuites. Incredibly strong feet grip the branch and they kick their legs resulting in the insect springing forwards like a deadly jack-in-a-box. They are excellent at calculating depth and thinking in three dimensions and have an 80% success rate when hunting. In captivity, we recommend feeding frozen mice, as you would a snake. Dangling it in the terrarium at the end of tongs will simulate a bird flying past.

Such impressive limbs could make it difficult for mantishoppers to walk, however they have evolved a unique style of movement among grasshoppers. They fold back their tarsus-claw and walk on the tibia, the next section of leg, here much smaller but with a rough surface to better grip while walking. In some ways, mantishoppers look like gorillas knuckle-walking, or as we believe pterosaurs walked millions of years ago. With such large back legs and front legs both long and full of spikes, the middle legs of mantishoppers are much smaller and are not used outside of mating. In some rare species they have disappeared altogether leaving them as quadrupedal insects.