Got in a disagreement with somebody over whether mantises are cute or not, and I’m turning to you guys to resolve it. I’m not explaining WHY you should find them cute because I don’t want to taint the poll results, I just want to know how cute people think they are.
In case you don’t know what a praying mantis is, it’s a predatory insect that looks like this.
For what it’s worth, I think all sorts of bugs are cute that most people don’t, including house centipedes, deep sea isopods, cockroaches (taken in isolation, cockroach infestations are still disgusting), and bees. You know exactly what you’re getting into when you click those links.
Poll incoming if I can figure it out in time.
To me they look like the mantis from A Bug’s Life and I don’t find him cute, or scary. But very interesting!
Yeah. It’s all about the face.
(Also, bees definitely have some cuteness going on. House centipedes… not so cute, but certainly beautiful and graceful–I’m always pleased when I see one.)
No, certainly not “cute-sy” but beautiful in their function.
Praying mantises look like koala bears compared to house centipedes, which squeeze through the cracks in your home’s foundation on their way up from hell.
is your head or the head of something you like being bitten off?
Their faces/heads are sort of cute, but taken all together, the animal is not a cute one.
The insect isn’t cute, but the Don Dixon song is.
Hey, cats torture small animals and then disembowel them before giving them as gifts, and they mate painfully with barbed willies. Does that somehow stop them from being the gold standard of cuteness? For that matter, ladybugs are voracious predators but they’re considered cute. Doing something abhorrent obviously doesn’t automatically disqualify something from being cute.
It depends on size. A full-size mantis is beautiful, in the same way a viper is: something to be admired from afar. Not something to be handled; they can give a good pinch or bite. A small mantis (fits on a quarter-dollar) is cute and fun to play with. I’ll catch them and put them on a flower for a photo-op. Or least out of harm’s way.
I also find small jumping spiders to be very cute. I’ll let them jump all about me. They can be surprisingly playful. Other spiders are summarily executed (if a black widow or inside my home) or avoided.
They are the pandas of the insect world. Adorbs!!
Bees (not wasps) are awesome, house centipedes should go die in a fire, mantises are graceful and so damned neat that I would indeed call them cute.
I like bees, especially those sweet little black Italian honeybees.
You gave us the perfect option, *No, “interesting” is not the same thing as “cute”. *
Much like Walking Sticks, I find the Preying Mantis very interesting and I always enjoy seeing them. But they really aren’t cute.
They’re beautiful, amazing creatures…but they’re not “cute”.
Incidentally, that little black dot on their compound eyes (which is part of what makes them so adorbz) is an artifact of reflection and/or refraction from the lenses, right? Not any sort of actual “structure” like a pupil.
Bees? They’re super-cute! Mantises are fascinating, gorgeous, and ever-so-slightly terrifying*, but definitely not cute.
*Oh, the shiver the first time I saw one slowly, disdainfully turn its head and look me right in the eye. “…Is there a problem, human?” Yeeek!
CUTE? Absolutely not. Sort of cool, in a creepy way? Definitely.
Those things are absolute killing machines. My son caught one and kept it a few weeks in a terrarium, and after a while, you couln’t help feeling sorry for even the most disgusting bugs it ate.
