THE male praying mantis must be the most stressed animal on Earth. If he tries to mate with a female, there鈥檚 a good chance she鈥檒l bite his head off. Thankfully, he has a handy camouflage tool: the wind.
Male Chinese mantids () are more likely to move towards a female . So Hiroshi Watanabe and Eizi Yano of Kinki University in Nara, Japan, wondered if the males were using the shaking vegetation to camouflage their movements.
They placed male and female mantids on leaves that were sometimes buffeted by the breeze from a fan and sometimes still. The males reached the females significantly faster with the fan switched on. To make sure the fan was not affecting the result in some other way, the team repeated the tests but held the leaves still. The females were more likely to detect males, even if the fan was on ().
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Watanabe suggests that the males used the cover provided by the wind to sneak up on the females. It鈥檚 not just about sex, either. In a separate study, Watanabe and Yano observed mantids of both genders hunting German cockroaches (). They captured the cockroaches faster when it was windy ().
