Culture Techniques for Acanthops Falcata, a Neotropical Mantid Suitable for Biological Studies (With Notes on Raising Web Building Spiders)

We think that we have found the solutions to these problems. We have devised a simple and inexpensive culture regime and found a species that is easy to manage in captivity. This species, Acanthops falcata Stol, is small enough to raise in large numbers in a modest amount of space and large enough to be convenient for a wide number of biological investigations. Females that are sexually receptive can be triggered to mate by a dark/light transition and males also become sexually active following such a transition. Matings are thus readily manipulable by the experimenter. In addition, the species is fecund and hardy. Our interest in solving the problems of raising predatory arthropods began in 1971, when we needed naive predators in order to investigate instinctive behavior. We used two species of araneid spiders, Argiope argentata and A. aemula, feeding them on dead drosophiloid flies (Robinson & Robinson, 1976a). Since then we have raised several generations of A. argentata and successfully hand reared two other species of web building spiders from egg cocoons, without the restriction of using dead prey, which makes the problem simpler.