Mantis
In culture, literature and art

One of the earliest mantis references is in the ancient Chinese dictionary Erya, which gives its attributes in poetry, where it represents courage and fearlessness, and a brief description. A later text, the Jingshi Zhenglei Daguan Bencao (transl. "Great History of Medical Material Annotated and Arranged by Types, Based upon the Classics and Historical Works") from 1108, gives accurate details of the construction of the egg packages, the development cycle, anatomy, and the function of the antennae.Although mantises are rarely mentioned in Ancient Greek sources, a female mantis in threat posture is accurately illustrated on a series of fifth-century BC silver coins, including didrachms, from Metapontum in Lucania. In the 10th century AD, Byzantine era Adages, Suidas describes an insect resembling a slow-moving green locust with long front legs. He translates Zenobius 2.94 with the words seriphos (maybe a mantis) and graus, an old woman, implying a thin, dried-up stick of a body.

Mantises are a common motif in Luna Polychrome ceramics of pre-Columbian Nicaragua, and are believed to represent a deity or spirit called "Madre Culebra".

Western descriptions of the biology and morphology of the mantises became more accurate in the 18th century. Roesel von Rosenhof illustrated and described mantises and their cannibalistic behavior in the Insekten-Belustigungen (Insect Entertainments).

In the early 1900s, people in the United States Ozarks region referred to them as Devil's horses.

Aldous Huxley made philosophical observations about the nature of death while two mantises mated in the sight of two characters in his 1962 novel Island (the species was Gongylus gongylodes). The naturalist Gerald Durrell 's humorously autobiographical 1956 book My Family and Other Animals includes a four-page account of an almost evenly matched battle between a mantis and a gecko. Shortly before the fatal dénouement, Durrell narrates:

he crashed into the mantis and made her reel, and grabbed the underside of her thorax in his jaws. Cicely retaliated by snapping both her front legs shut on Geronimo's hindlegs. They rustled and staggered across the ceiling and down the wall, each seeking to gain some advantage.

M. C. Escher 's woodcut Dream depicts a human-sized mantis standing on a sleeping bishop.

A cultural trope imagines the female mantis as a femme fatale. The idea is propagated in cartoons by Cable, Guy and Rodd, LeLievre, T. McCracken, and Mark Parisi, among others. It ends Isabella Rossellini 's short film about the life of a praying mantis in her 2008 Green Porno season for the Sundance Channel.

The Deadly Mantis is a 1957 American science fiction monster film, with a giant mantis threatening mankind.
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