Alien Ninjas and Food Chain Reversal

Here is a BAMF of a bug.

Giant Devil's Flower Mantis (aka alien ninja)

And here are several things about this bug that make me extremely happy:

• Its Latin name is Idolomantis diabolica.
• It mimics flowers, so that sometimes prey flies directly into it.
• It is the largest--and rarest--mantis.
• It can be found in eastern Africa (winter break trip?).
• Each instar is a different color. 1st instar is black, some of the middle instars are brown and leaf-like, and the last instar is brightly colored like the alien ninja in the picture above. 
• On its Wikipedia page, all of the colors are hyperlinked.

Speaking of badass mantises, one of our lecture powerpoints had this picture in it...

...which is vaguely disturbing slash really cool.

So I decided to do a little bit of research and find out whether the bird-eating mantis was actually a thing.

First, I found this wonderful affirmation of the intelligence and benevolence of the human race.

And then I found this.

So mantises do eat birds. And it turns out they eat a lot of other things, too, including snakes, rodents, and each other. And apparently humans, as long as they're small. Mantis mouthparts are well-suited to this rampant carnivory, seeing as they consist of hugely overgrown mandibles.

According to a study about size-based prey recognition in mantises, volume (as opposed to width, length, shape, or area) is the most important consideration for hungry mantises. Apparently mantises use the volume of their prey as an indicator of its energy content. In the study, the volume that elicited a "watch response" (basically the precursor to an attack, where the mantis scopes out its quarry) with the highest frequency was 112.2 cubic millimeters, about the size of a cube with half-centimeter sides. That's pretty small, especially considering that they used 7 cm long mantises for the study. So I guess that mantises usually prefer smaller fare, and the whole bird-and-reptile-and-mammal-eating thing is a little less common.