When you observe a praying mantis, its swiveling head and its following eyes give a creepy sense that you are being watched.

Before making this video, I knew praying mantises were kinda cool and kinda creepy.

When I found one while camping in Texas, I made my boyfriend, now husband, help me take pictures of it for like an hour.

Literally an hour before I was going to export this video, by an amazing coincidence, I found one patrolling my zucchini plants.

For being such a small insect, its behavior was rather bold.

It climbed on me, hopped on my phone, and stared deep into my soul.

I freaking love these bugs.

I love the way that they seem so aware of their surroundings.

I've always known they had this penetrating gaze and amazing raptorial claws.

What I didn't know is that they eat birds.

And frogs.

And they seem to do it more than we ever realized.

This little fact only feeds into what is their already creepy reputation.

If you know anything about praying mantids, you probably know that the females eat the males after mating.

And because of this and their unsettling gaze, many people straight up hate praying mantids or think that they're evil.

Just look at the comments of the video of the praying mantis eating the hummingbird.

But even though they do eat birds and they do eat their boyfriends, praying mantids are so much more than creepy little freaks.

Their hunting style, while sometimes shocking, is incredibly impressive.

With no venom and no stinger.

How is it possible that this relatively small invertebrate takes down things much bigger than itself?

And on top of this, some praying mantises take their ambush hunting to the next level, operating under an incredible disguise.

And unlike many other insect predators who use chemoreception and mechanoreception for hunting, the praying mantis finds its prey visually.

And their eyes are some of the most sophisticated in the insect world.

They are the only known insect to see in 3D.

Their vision is so unique and so powerful that researchers think it could hold the answer to computer vision in certain small robots.

And when it comes to eating their boyfriends, it's not just because they're ruthless man-haters.

They have a pretty compelling reason for this unusual behavior.

Praying mantises are so incredible, researchers put them in a category of their own among insects, comparing them more closely to vertebrates than their insect counterparts.

There is nothing else like them.

How are praying mantises able to kill prey so much larger than they are?

What makes them such accurate assassins?

And why do they eat their boyfriends?

When you think of a praying mantis, this charismatic green insect probably comes to mind.

But there are so many different species of mantis.

Mantises are an order of insects that contain over 2,400 species in about 460 genera in 33 families.

The closest relatives they have are cockroaches and termites, but even then they aren't that close.

They diverged from a common ancestor around 300 million years ago.

With thousands of praying mantis species in the world, the anatomy between them inevitably varies quite a bit.

The smallest mantis is the Bulbae pygmaea, which is about one centimeter long when fully grown.

The heaviest species of praying mantis is the West African megamantis, with the female sometimes weighing over 13 grams.

And the longest is the giant stick mantis from northern Africa, measuring over 17 centimeters in length.

And among all these species of praying mantis are some of the most fascinating examples of crypsis and mimicry in the animal kingdom.

The life of a praying mantis begins as it hatches from its egg sac, as it joins hundreds of its siblings and oozes down to the branches below.

These are orchid mantis nymphs, and from day one, they are already an evolutionary wonder.

These small insects mimic a type of assassin bug, a foul-tasting insect with an incredibly painful stab from its proboscis.

Cloaked in their disguise, these small nymphs will traverse the landscape of leaves and branches, hunting all that they can, snatching sizable prey.

They are also trying to evade confrontation with any predator.

But if they do come across a hungry foe, they have a surprising tactic up their sleeve.

This kung fu stance makes the nymph look bigger and more threatening, and is often enough to keep predators away.

And if they evade their many predators, they will turn into one of the most dazzling insects known to man, the orchid mantis.

But only if they're one of the lucky ones.

Orchid mantises are elusive animals that live in tropical forests of Southeast Asia, and the females look remarkably like the petals of orchid flowers.

And yes, sometimes they eat their babies.

They will even move with a swaying motion, as if being blown in the breeze.

Their deceptive appearance helps to conceal themselves from predators, but also to aid in ambush hunting.

They hide themselves in plain view, their flowery appearance luring in pollinating insects.

And then, before the pollinator knows what's happening, the mantis snatches it with blinding speed.

Field experiments show that orchid mantises attract wild pollinators at a rate even higher than real flowers.

Because their camouflage is used for hunting, and not just hiding from predators, this mimicry is sometimes called aggressive mimicry.

And it's so effective that the orchid mantis has to be evolutionarily careful.

If these mantids become too abundant, over-predation on pollinating insects could hurt the very thing they mimic.

And if the real orchids disappear, then the schtick is up.

Thus, the fact that orchid mantids are so rare and elusive may be a critical aspect of their success.

Their rarity may also ensure that the chances of pollinators encountering multiple orchid mantises are low, thus reducing the likelihood that pollinators will learn to distinguish deceptive orchid mantises from the real flowers.

This incredible mimicry is an example of adaptive resemblance, where the insects have evolved to look like a specific object.

This is different from the more commonplace crypsis, where animals evolve to simply blend in to their background.

This is common in praying mantids, too.

Many species are colored green or brown to blend into the vegetation.

Or there's the bark mantis that looks just like tree bark, or the desert mantis that looks just like sand.

But if you take a cryptic insect like this and put it on a plain background, it would still look like an insect.

But if you take a mantis that has specialized its resemblance and put it on a plain background, that mantis would still look like an orchid.

Other mantids in this category look just like green leaves, or others look indistinguishable from a twig.

This type of mimicry is so precise that researchers think some mantids evolved directly in parallel with the things they replicate.

But not all mantids resemble harmless sticks or flowers.

Many mantids resemble less than palatable things, or even things that are downright scary for their would-be predators.

The orchid mantis nymphs, as we already discussed, mimic the dangerous assassin bug.

The ant mantis, one of the smallest mantids, resembles a black ant in its juvenile stage.

Predators like birds and other large insects tend to avoid ants as prey because they can be aggressive, taste unpleasant, bite, or sting.

But there's one mantis that punches above its weight when it comes to what it mimics.

This is the iris oratoria, also known as the Mediterranean mantis.

At first glance, it looks like a fairly regular-looking mantis.

But when threatened, it lifts its forelegs, stares straight at the threat, and lifts its eyes in a striking eyespot.

Even in flight, researchers think this mimicry continues to work, the eyespots resembling the eyes of a flying owl.

But for all of the many camouflaging mantids out there, there's one difficult evolutionary question they face.

What happens if the leaves or flowers they mimic shrivel and die?

What happens if the green grass they hide within turns brown in a drought?

As I said before, if the orchids disappear, the orchid mantids are in serious trouble.

But for other mantids, if their habitat suddenly changes, it's not always so dire.

Because some mantids have a surprising trick that they can implement, a trick where they can change colors.

The Egyptian praying mantis lives in the savannas of Africa, where it lives on grass, doing its best to blend in.

But here, grass can change from brown to green within a few days following rain.

However, researchers noticed that when the grass was green, the mantids were green.

But when the grass was brown, the mantids were brown.

How can this be?

As far as we know, mantids can't change color like an octopus or chameleon, where the color change happens in seconds or minutes, triggered by hormones or neurons.

However, they can change color when they molt.

In this species, color change during molting is triggered by the relative humidity around them.

When the relative humidity is low, the nymphs become brown at the next molt.

When the relative humidity is high, they become green.

And they are not the only species to do this.

Other mantids can change color based on other stimuli.

For some species, the change is triggered by the light intensity around them.

High intensity light causes nymphs to change from green to brown.

To them, more light could indicate that the leaves of their hiding spot are shriveling and falling off due to drought, and their green color would not be of much help.

Other species of mantids in Africa even turn from green to black at the end of the dry season when most fires occur, a coloration known as fire melanism.

And other flower mantids can change color when moved from one coloration of flower to another.

All of this color changing in response to their habitat is called environmental polymorphism.

Mimicry in crypsis has been described as one of the most influential and illustrative examples of natural selection since the concept of evolution was discovered.

And the many different ways that praying mantis species use deception may be the most impressive that exist.

While looking at all of this visual deception, there's one more thing to consider with the praying mantis.

Human researchers are inevitably biased to look for crypsis and mimicry that we can see, since humans are primarily visual creatures.

But so much that happens in the insect world is auditory, chemical, or tactile.

As masters of deception, it's entirely possible that praying mantids are also audio mimics, or chemical ones for that matter.

After all, how does the orchid mantis attract more pollinators than real flowers?

Scent cues are important for pollinators to detect flowers.

So it's entirely plausible that mantises also mimic the smell of the flowers they visually emulate.

It's an area of research that's largely unexplored, and would be mind-blowing if we could prove it to be true.

But that's just a bit of fun speculation.

But beyond blending in to trick potential prey, how does a mantis execute its kills?

And how does it hunt prey so much bigger than itself?

Mantises can be loosely categorized as being long-winged, short-winged, or vestigial-winged.

The outer wings are usually narrow and leathery.

They function as camouflage, and as a shield for the hind wings, which are much more delicate.

When not in use, the wings are held close together over their body, giving them a streamlined appearance.

Whether a praying mantis can fly depends greatly on the species.

Praying mantises primarily use their wings for short bursts of flight or gliding while hunting or escaping predators.

They can also use their wings as a defense mechanism, by spreading them out suddenly and making loud noises that startle potential threats.

However, not all praying mantids have wings.

Some are wingless.

And mantids like this get around through incredibly accurate jumping.

Researchers found that wingless, juvenile thorny-armed praying mantises can jump from a horizontal surface to a vertical one, two body lengths away, with nearly 100% accuracy.

The high level of accuracy here is enabled by the rotation of their abdomen about the thorax.

Once airborne, they then transfer angular momentum to the other parts of their body and make a precise landing.

Researchers discovered just how important the transfer of angular momentum is for their jump by gluing a mantid's abdominal parts together so it couldn't properly rotate.

The accuracy of the jump itself wasn't really impeded.

The mantises still reached their target, but couldn't rotate their bodies into the correct position, so crashed face-first into it.

But winged or wingless, big or small, all mantids have greatly enlarged forelegs adapted for catching and gripping prey.

When stationary, these legs remain folded at the front of their bodies, giving them the name praying mantis.

Also known as raptorial claws, these front legs are highly specialized for grasping onto prey.

They're made up of five segments.

In praying mantids, the coxa is unusually long for an insect leg and is covered in spines.

The femur and tibia are similarly covered in tubercles.

These spines and tubercles enable the mantis to grab onto prey.

They are stiff yet lightweight, and once a prey animal is within their grasp, it is very hard for them to escape.

The strike of a praying mantis has two phases.

The first is the approach phase, where a mantis extends its arms up and outward.

Then there is the sweep phase, where the mantis scoops the prey out of the air and pulls it in to eat.

These strikes happen in less than a tenth of a second.

To understand more about praying mantis prey capture, I talked to Christopher Ophiro, professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Towson University.

I come from a vertebrate world originally, and comparing it to other organisms, there's not many that are throwing their arms out into the air to try and grab prey.

You know, you think about vertebrates that have tongues like chameleons and salamanders, or fish that use suction, or snakes that use their whole body, like here's these organisms that are using, you know, segmented forelegs to be able to capture prey in midair.