Surviving a Baby Praying Mantis Hatch With an 11-Month-Old Kid

It was 6:15 AM on a Tuesday, and I was staring at a plastic mesh butterfly pavilion on my kitchen counter like I was waiting for a server to reboot. I held a plastic spray bottle in one hand, completely frozen, while my 11-month-old son aggressively slammed his fists against his high chair tray demanding his morning oatmeal. Inside the mesh enclosure sat a brown, foam-like clump I had purchased off the internet during a late-night scrolling session. My wife walked into the kitchen, looked at the mesh cage, looked at me, and just sighed. I had told her this was going to be a highly educational STEM activity for our son. Never mind that his current developmental milestone was figuring out how to throw a silicone spoon across the room with maximum velocity. I was convinced we needed to connect with nature, and in my sleep-deprived brain, that meant bringing predatory insects into our Portland duplex.

Apparently, when you order praying mantis eggs online, they don't send you a neatly packaged egg carton. They send you an ootheca, which looks exactly like a dried piece of spray foam insulation that fell off a construction site. The instructions said it contained anywhere from twenty to four hundred tiny bugs. I figured we'd get maybe ten. I was fundamentally, mathematically wrong.

The 2 AM internet server request

The whole thing started because I got anxious about my kid's exposure to the natural world. I'm a software engineer, which means I spend nine hours a day staring at dark mode text editors, and I suddenly felt this crushing guilt that my son's only interaction with wildlife was watching crows pick at the garbage bins in our alley. I went down a Reddit rabbit hole about beneficial garden insects and somehow ended up with a shopping cart full of mesh enclosures and a dormant egg case.

The incubation process is basically just a waiting game where you try to keep the little container slightly warm and mist it occasionally so the eggs don't dry out into tiny insect fossils. I kept a smart thermometer next to the jar, obsessively tracking the ambient room data like I was monitoring CPU temps during a stress test.

Then, six weeks later, the deployment happened.

Executing the hatch sequence

I was pouring coffee when I noticed the mesh cage was moving. Not the cage itself, but the interior walls. They were vibrating. I leaned in close and realized the brown foam clump had essentially exploded. Hundreds of tiny, alien-looking green threads were dropping from the egg case, dangling on invisible microscopic strings. Once they hit the bottom of the enclosure, they shook themselves off and started marching around like a microscopic infantry.

Every single one of them was a perfect, millimeter-long replica of an adult praying mantis. They had the little scythe arms, the triangle heads, the giant alien eyes. It was genuinely one of the coolest things I've ever seen, right up until I frantically googled what to feed them and discovered the cannibalism protocol.

If you don't release a newly hatched baby praying mantis into the wild immediately, or separate them into individual containers, they'll look at their brothers and sisters and decide that they're the most convenient breakfast in town. It turns into a tiny, green battle royale within hours. We didn't want a thunderdome in our kitchen, so I grabbed the cage, sprinted into our backyard in my slippers in the pouring Portland rain, and started shaking hundreds of microscopic predators into our rhododendron bushes while my neighbor watched me from his window. We only kept one. We put him in a separate, smaller mason jar with a mesh lid. We named him Baby P.

Sourcing live data and fruit flies

Feeding a baby p is a logistical nightmare that nobody prepares you for. They only eat live, moving prey. They won't eat a dead bug. They won't eat a bug that's holding still. They require active, panicking targets to trigger their hunting sequence.

This means you've to buy flightless fruit flies. The fruit flies come in a plastic deli cup filled with this blue, gelatinous food paste at the bottom that smells exactly like a frat house basement on a Sunday morning. The flies breed in the cup. To feed the mantis, you're supposed to gently tap the fruit fly cup to knock the flies off the lid, open it a crack, and tap two or three flies into the mantis enclosure. It sounds simple. It's absolutely impossible.

Every time I opened the fruit fly cup, it was like a prison break. I'd tap the side, open the lid a millimeter, and suddenly forty flies would surge the gap. I’d panic, slam the lid shut, and realize half of them had escaped onto my hands, the counter, and my kid's high chair. I spent two weeks of my life slapping my own kitchen counters trying to contain the breaches. My wife threatened to move out at least twice a week. The flies would crawl all over everything.

This is actually how I developed such a deep, big appreciation for the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit we had bought a few weeks prior. One morning, the fruit fly container slipped out of my hand entirely. It hit the counter, the lid popped off, and a cloud of flightless flies cascaded directly onto my son's lap while he was eating bananas. He was wearing this exact sleeveless onesie. My wife loves that it's made of organic cotton and doesn't trigger his eczema, but my absolute favorite feature is the envelope-style shoulders. Instead of trying to drag a fly-covered, banana-smeared garment over my kid's head and getting bug debris in his hair, I just snapped the bottom open, pulled the whole neckline down over his shoulders, slid it down his legs, and threw the entire biological disaster straight into the washing machine on the sanitary cycle. It washed perfectly. It didn't shrink, it didn't warp, and it retained zero percent of the fruit fly basement smell.

Firmware updates require downtime

About two weeks into having Baby P, the mantis stopped eating. He just hung upside down from the mesh lid of the jar and refused to move. I thought I had broken him. I assumed my erratic misting schedule or the stress of living next to a screaming baby had caused a fatal system error.

From what I hastily read on a buggy insect forum at midnight, praying mantises have to shed their exoskeleton to grow. They essentially unzip their own skin and pull a slightly larger, softer version of themselves out of the old shell. During this process, they're incredibly fragile. If they fall, they die. If you poke them, they die. If a stray fruit fly bumps into them while they're soft, the fruit fly can actually kill them.

So I was suddenly tasked with guarding this jar like it held the nuclear launch codes. I couldn't let my son bang on the table. I couldn't move the jar to clean the counter. I just had to sit there and wait for the firmware update to complete.

Keeping an 11-month-old away from the one thing on the kitchen table he isn't allowed to touch is an exercise in futility. I tried distracting him with his Gentle Baby Building Block Set. I had originally set these up near the jar, hoping my son would somehow associate the colorful numbers and fruit shapes on the blocks with the educational insect experience happening next to them. That didn't happen. He mostly just likes grabbing the silicone block with the number 4 on it and aggressively chewing on the corner. But honestly, they're great because they're made of soft rubber, so when he eventually gets bored and throws them at my head while I'm hunched over the mantis jar trying to spot a molting sequence, it doesn't leave a bruise.

When the blocks failed, I handed him his Panda Teether. I'll be honest, this teether is just okay for us. It does the job—it's soft silicone, BPA-free, and he definitely gnaws on the textured surfaces when his gums are bothering him. But the bamboo detail on it makes me completely paranoid about leaving it soaking in the sink water with our other dishes, so I end up having to hand-wash and dry it immediately every single time it hits the floor. And since my son's favorite game is "drop the panda and watch dad scramble," I was washing this thing six times a morning while simultaneously trying to protect a molting insect.

The final deployment to production

Baby P successfully molted. He left behind a ghostly, transparent shell of himself hanging from the mesh, which was simultaneously gross and fascinating. He got noticeably bigger, turned a slightly darker shade of green, and his appetite for those awful fruit flies doubled.

By the time my son hit his 11-month birthday, Baby P had molted three times and was getting too big for his mason jar. We had a family meeting (which consisted of me talking to my wife while the baby threw cheerios at the dog) and decided it was time to release our tiny green hostage into the wild.

We took the jar out to the garden. I held my son in one arm, unscrewed the lid with the other, and we watched Baby P slowly crawl up a rhododendron leaf. He paused at the top, swiveled his triangular head to look at us one last time, and vanished into the foliage.

Did my son learn anything about the fragile balance of ecosystems or the mechanics of incomplete metamorphosis? Absolutely not. He tried to eat a handful of dirt the second I put him down. But as a dad, it felt like a tiny victory. We had successfully kept a secondary lifeform alive in our house without crashing the main servers.

If you're trying to figure out how to entertain a baby without losing your mind, maybe skip the live predatory insects and stick to something a little less complicated. You can check out Kianao's full wooden play gym collection for sensory activities that don't involve escaping fruit flies.

And before you decide to order an egg case at 2 AM because you're feeling guilty about screen time, stock up on some organic basics and chew-safe toys first. Your future self will thank you.

My highly unprofessional bug FAQs

Are baby praying mantises dangerous to kids?
No, they're completely harmless to humans. They don't have venom, and when they're babies, their little scythe arms are way too small to even pinch a baby's skin. The biggest danger is actually your kid accidentally squishing the bug because infants have the grip strength of a hydraulic press.

How many bugs seriously hatch out of that egg case?
Way more than you want. Seriously. The internet says anywhere from 50 to 200, but when it happened in my kitchen, it felt like a thousand. You absolutely must hatch the egg case inside a large mesh enclosure, or you'll be vacuuming tiny green insects out of your curtains for a month.

Do I've to feed them fruit flies?
Yeah, there's really no workaround for this. They only eat live prey, and baby mantises are too small to eat crickets or anything else from the pet store. You have to buy flightless fruit flies, and you've to mentally prepare yourself for the fact that flightless doesn't mean motionless. They will run everywhere.

Can I keep more than one baby praying mantis in the same jar?
Absolutely not. They're aggressive cannibals. If you put two of them in a jar, you'll eventually just have one slightly fatter praying mantis. If you want to keep a few of them to observe, you've to buy separate enclosures for each one.

What do I do when the mantis stops eating and hangs upside down?
Don't touch it. It's molting. It's going to shed its exoskeleton. Make sure there are no stray fruit flies running around the enclosure while this happens, because a rogue fruit fly can seriously damage the mantis while its new skin is soft. Just leave it alone and keep your toddler from banging on the table.