Thursday, August 17, 2023

Footie Selfie W/Bug

Surf-bedraggled praying mantis gains a TSG toehold
Limantour Beach / Point Reyes National Seashore

Posted by at

3 comments:

Parm said...

Rough day for the little dude, eh? This posting just begs for a "rest of the story" follow up. As in, then what happened?

August 18, 2023 at 12:50 PM
yawndave said...

Well, "the rest of the story" is...

Immediately after taking the photo, a wave came in, and despite lifting my foot up and hopping around to keep it out of the water, the poor mantis fell off and got swept back into the ocean. BUT...I waited for a moment and was able to rescue it when the next wave came in.

Looking even the worse for wear, the mantis was still alive, so I carried it up to higher ground to place on more bug-suitable terrain. A nearby couple asked me what I was doing and expressed great interest in the mantis. The man said, "I wondered what you were doing, hopping around on one foot over there." He went on to say there was big population of mantises(manti?) in the Black Rock Desert near the site of Burning Man.

The woman thought the mantis was extremely cool, so I handed it off to her and she washed the sand of it with a little squirt from her water bottle. With a little difficulty, she coaxed it off her arm and on to some dune grass. Frankly I was quite surprised that it was still alive after the surf encounter but the little guy seemed fairly robust. I wished it well and went back to my walk along the beach.

August 19, 2023 at 9:16 AM
Praying Parm said...

Thank you. And, yay, that's about as happy an ending as one might expect.

August 19, 2023 at 12:30 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)