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Praying mantis Name: New Zealand praying mantis
Look/Listen: It can be tricky at first to tell the difference between Springbok and New Zealand mantis, but by all accounts this becomes easy once you’ve figured it out. The Springbok mantis is bigger and varies in colour, where ours is always bright green. The thorax (the long neck-like bit between its head and abdomen) of the native species is wide and flat, where that of the South African is skinny, almost as if it had a cinched waist. But the easiest way to tell if you’re looking at a NZ specimen is to check the inside of its front legs for a purple-blue spot - if it’s there, it’s native.
Māori name: Rō or whē Status: Native, at risk. Scientific name: Orthodera novaezealandiae Description: The praying mantis is a very cool-looking insect. Take its head, for example, a weird triangle with a mouth on the pointy bit and a bulbous compound eye in each top corner, which would likely turn as if to assess you if you were to approach. Plus those legs! Unlike other insects, the mantis primarily uses only four of its legs to walk, holding its spiky forelimbs up in ‘prayer’ position, ready to shoot out and trap its prey. In New Zealand there’s only one native species of praying mantis (compared to 20 in Australia), but there’s also a South African interloper – the Springbok mantis, or Miomantis caffra – which arrived about 1978 and quickly spread around the country.
Tell me a story: There are a few different reasons for the decline in rō numbers, but one is the proliferation of the Springbok mantis, which competes for food, does better in the cold, and has more babies more often. Research by behavioural ecologist Dr Greg Howell at the University of Auckland in 2014 also found that two-thirds of native mantises are devoured by South African females, lured in by their attractive scent and lacking any inbuilt evolutionary caution. The worst part is, the two species are actually unable to mate with each other, so they go to their deaths in vain.
Habitat: Rō are found throughout New Zealand except on Stewart and the Chatham Islands and the West Coast.They prefer open, shrubby terrain where they can camouflage themselves amongst leaves in order to surprise prey.
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