Oothecas, Swarms and Keeping

Our last Charlotte Mason gathering at l'HaRMaS saw each guest gifted with their own praying mantis nest in a jar to bring home.  Our instructions were brief and number two warns us to check the ootheca daily from mid-May to June... if you live north of the border.

Praying Mantis egg sack, the ootheca.

Leslie Laurio, our dear Friend of l'HaRMaS and Ambleside Online Advisory member, gives us a heads up on the migration of warm weather as it arrives in Tennessee: "I've kept my jar outside on the back porch all winter and I've been checking them every day. Miranda looked at the jar after church, and it was swarming with little baby mantises! I let them loose in various locations all over my backyard so they will hopefully spread out and not eat each other. I have the pod, and it has little dry egg casings hanging from it. It looks like each mantis had an individual little case that he broke out of. I wish I could have seen them coming out."

I put a call in to Sarah, our ootheca collector,  and asked for further advice: Keep the jar in the garage until it really warms up outside, leave them in a place where the jar will not fill up with rain water, and try to keep them two feet off the ground so the ants don’t get an easy meal.

Here’s a great idea from Laurie: “I'm at my community garden plot digging beds...hurrying home to check mine. They went from one of the worst winters on record on my balcony under a flower pot to the back of a u haul truck to my garage. Maybe it's time to share them at the community garden?”

It's still there in the shed.

Some of us, like Melanie, need the reminder to look at our safely stored jar as it is easy to be distracted with spring bringing more than insects: “Oh!  I almost forgot mine!  I have been watching a little spider egg sac on a boxwood shrub a few houses down on my street almost every day but nothing has hatched yet.”  

I am going to attempt to make it a more prolonged nature study. That cast off aquarium I picked up from the neighbors last year will make a great viewing gallery for my ootheca and will be sure to amuse the nine year old boys in my science club. I just read that you could hang raw hamburger on a string instead of also growing aphids for their food as starving mantises will eat each other not recognizing they are kin.

Swarming is the operative word; from that little Styrofoam-like nest, the size of a walnut, comes around 200 little praying mantises.  They will not hurt you and will not fly out at you as they need a few molts before they will get their wings like the adults.

The Living Page by Laurie Bestvater calls it keeping: take out your Nature Notebook, describe the nest, the hatching and all you see, draw or note what the nest looks like after the swarm has left, take a good look at the baby mantises, use your magnifying glass, make a notation in your Book of Firsts when they do hatch, do something in order to keep this incredible experience as part of what you do know.

Fabre and the Praying Mantis

 "Only a genius can write a scientific book that throbs with life and is still scientific.  Read Fabre's descriptions of insect life, those fascinating stories from which one has to tear one's self away, and compare the description of the same insect in a text book of biology - one is a living story of living creatures, the other a lifeless account of dead, dissected things." D. Avery, Parents Review, vol. 31. no. 9 edited by Charlotte Mason

Indeed, Jean Henri Fabre, son of semi-literate peasant farmers in France, became famous throughout the world for his scientific observations of insects and spiders.

We are living some hundred years since his death and there are scientists today who are thinking his observations are outdated and unscientific.  They have gone so far as to launch a three year study on the supposed myth, "perpetuated" by Fabre on the tale that the female mantis eats the male after mating. Peterson's First Guides: Insects had the nerve to state this as early as 1987 in their publications saying: "contrary to popular belief, recent research suggests that the female does not eat the male while mating."

Fabre, in his own words, writes but one sentence in his book Insects:  "Indeed, she even makes a habit of devouring her mate, whom she seizes by the neck and then swallows by little mouthfuls, leaving only the wings." Why did the science community take his word for it? Why did they not question nor study the mantis for themselves to prove it true or not? I think it is because anytime anyone went to look more closely at the fly, or spider, or any other creature after reading his work they realized Fabre had described just what they were seeing. If they didn't actually see something he described they confidently took his word for it. Everyone accepted Fabre's observations as scientific truth, even Louis Pasteur visited him because Fabre "already had a reputation as an expert on insect life". 

This video, by New Atlantis, is the result of years of research following mantises through their life cycle again and again.  Be sure to watch through past the credits to the postscript.

At l'HaRMaS, we had a few live praying mantises for display, one of which we named Hildegard. Megan Hoyt introduced us to Hildegard, "a twelfth century polymath who wrote books, music, created art, and was a Benedictine abbess and mystic". The beginning of this documentary reminded me of an "praying" abbess...

Fabre was a scientist. He spent hours each day, most days each week for months and years. He recorded his observations in minute detail and shared his passion in marvelously descriptive and fascinating books. Fabre was right and what he recorded was true.

How a Book Got a Boy Out Of a Snowsuit

I tutor.  Through one of my other students I got a call from a mom who wanted literacy support for her young son. She warned me that he was not willing and when the day arrived for our first time together she came to the door without him. He had refused to get out of the truck. She went back and forth cajoling and encouraging until he finally got out but stood in the snowbank just outside my backdoor. His mom and I thought she should leave while I kept an eye on him.

I opened the door and invited him in. He gave me no response or indication that he even heard me. I opened the door again and gently told him that he was welcome to come into the house whenever his wished and when he did I would read him a story. I held my breath. Within a few long minutes he came to the door and I let him in. He shook off one snow boot and slowly pulled off one mitten then stopped.

He stood there in my heated house wearing a full snowsuit: snow pants, winter jacket with toque on under the hood and the one boot and mitt. I pulled up a chair to the back door where he seemed rooted and read to him. After a half hour I took out a d'Aulaire and a Macaulay book hoping one of the illustrations would entice him and asked him to pick one. A single finger from the un-mittened hand slowly emerged and pointed to Pyramids. He even took the invitation to sit down on another fold out chair beside me. I added a few minutes of silence at the end of each page so he could examine the pictures: I knew he was looking because I could see his eyelashes lower and twitch. We sat like that till his mother arrived twenty minutes later. I never did see his face nor hear his voice.

The following week his resolute mother brought him back and again left him standing in the snowbank outside my back door. I opened it and said we could read some more of the pyramid book if he came inside. He did and this time agreed to take off both mittens and both boots but kept on his winter jacket and toque. He willingly walked with me to the couch and sat beside me. I asked him if he remembered what we had read last week. He nodded. I asked if he wanted me to read more. He nodded. After about five pages I asked him to read the next page. He did and from then on we alternated. We would pause and talk about the story and the pictures and wonder. I finally had a conversation while looking into the sweet face of a nine year old boy. I stopped reading before the end of the book figuring I needed the rest of it to get him back into my house for the next week.

It's been a couple of months now and just last week he walked for the first time by himself all the way from school to my home. We chat and read and joke and laugh. It is the story in the living book that can bring strangers like us together. It is that book that can transport us to faraway places and execute leaps in our imagination. That perfect book can also encourage one to shed the barrier of a snowsuit.