Regarding being grateful one is larger than a mantis, let me share a story from my morning.
As I was checking around outside, I noticed this beautiful cicada sleeping on a hardy hibiscus:
A little while later, he'd waked up:
Later still, I heard a loud whirring in that same area. I wondered if maybe he was trying to shed his shell like they do. (We always used to collect those "empties" and save them.)
But no, instead this is what I discovered:
The mantis was so well-hidden, at first I thought maybe the cicada had gotten caught in some spider web attached to a big leaf! It took maybe ten or fifteen seconds of peering at this scene before I realized what I was looking at.
I'm glad, I guess, that it was a cicada the mantis got and not a butterfly or a hummingbird! These cicada are about hummingbird size, after all.
This all inspired me to google cicadas, because while I'd always thought of the mantids as "good" bugs, I didn't remember anything either way about cicadas.
What I found was interesting. The egg laying process can do damage to young trees (but not that much.) The grubs apparently do munch and sip on the roots of herbaceous plants (but not that much.) The google page itself was highly instructive because every article on the page was basically saying that cicadas do very little harm and are wonderful creatures -- every article except two for pesticide companies, each of which led off with a statement that would make you believe cicadas can kill your whole garden if you don't splorch them with Big Splorcher.
Honestly.
I also learned that in several cultures, cicadas are considered creatures of good fortune, symbolizing and bringing wisdom and long life.
I guess this cicada's long life came to an end in my rosemary.
And that is one BIG mantis!
