I’ve heard that it is easy to keep praying mantises as pets, and just feed them raw meat. I tried last year, feeding them turkey. Alas, both died. So does anyone have any idea what I should feed them if I attempt this again this year? Any other tips? Oh, and I know this last question is more MPSIMS material, but any name ideas (I won’t be able to tell if they are male or female, so names that apply to both sexes would be great.)
Crickets.
Mantids are my favorite insects, and a couple of times a year I catch one and invite it into my impromptu studio for a modeling session. I discovered that mantids love crickets (you can get them at a bait shop or pet store), and she will happily sit there chowing down on one while you snap away with your camera.
Back in my youth we used to catch & keep mantises as pets. Don’t remember how long they lived, but we fed them grasshoppers. Kinda gruesome to watch them catch & kill them, you know how insects are.
Every boy goes thru his ‘Beavis & Butthead’ phase, huh-huh…
I had a mantis for a pet years ago when I was on kibbutz. I fed it flies, dead ones and stunned ones, and it ate them like they were corn on the cob. Only the body was eaten and the wings fluttered down to the bottom. It was quite the ravenous insect. 
And no, mantises are not a protected species.
Anything already dead that I might be able to get easily at a store?
You can easily get crickets, live usually, from a pet store. They keep them for the lizards, you know. They’ll put them in a little plastic bag for you and you can tip them into the cage you keep the praying mantis in. They are cheap, easy, and tasty for the little mantis.
Here’s an idea:
http://www.rlephoto.com/birds/hummer01.htm
(Apparently, they catch hummingbirds often enough to be considered a significant predator of them. Puts me in mind of my old high school biology teacher who observed that if a praying mantis were the size of a dog, there wouldn’t be anything left alive on the planet. Adjusted for weight, they might just be the most impressive predators around.)
Well, I suppose you don’t want to know the bi-annual treat my scorpion gets. 
But he gets fed crickets as the staple. You just can’t go wrong with them for anything physiolocially able to consume them. And they’re really damn cheap. Oh, even cheaper? Throw in any flies you can catch. And confirm this first, but I think ants are suitable as well.
Never seen it compared to the Preying Mantis, but isn’t there a beetle that is considered the strongest in terms of comparative weight/size? Again, never seen one compared to a Mantis on Discovery.
My mantis, Keith, is only tiny (2nd instar) but growing fast. I catch thing like flies, beetles, moths etc/ in the garden, anything smaller than him really, once every couple of days and he’s happy.
A varied diet is important - they can become weak if fed only on a single type of food (ie. crickets), but they are incredibly easy to keep otherwise. Just make sure it’s never too cold and give the cage a spray of water with a plant mister every couple of days.
Two boxes of crickets and one box of mealworms shoudl get them through the winter along with some heat/light from a nearby lamp for a couple of hours a day. However, they only tend to live for about 18 months anyway so don’t be too disappointed if they don’t last a winter.
When they grow up they can eat hummingbirds as above and even baby mice (warning: yuk factor medium).
And yes, ONLY feed them live food if possible - that’s what their digestive systems are designed for.
You can tell their sex by looking at the last body segment at the end of the abdomen. A female’s will be bigger than the other segments, a males smaller. Females grow larger as adults, but males fly better (yes they can fly too!)
A friend called his mantis “Dread” after “Dreadlock Holiday” by 10cc, because of the chorus:
I don’t like cricket,
I love it.
try killing the turkey first? 
Maybe they just got really, really sleepy from all that tryptophan, and it only looked like they were dead. :eek:
Well, somebody has to say this:
If you teach a mantis to fish, then he will eat for life.
I often wonder what those things looked like back in prehistoric times :eek:
As a kid, we paired up a Mantis with a Black Widow spider, and the Mantis killed and ate the Black Widow every time (based on 6 trials). Coolest insects, IMHO.
Did you let the spider weave a web first? It hardly seems fair otherwise!
Like this maybe?
http://www.hammerposters.com/pics/us20008.jpg
Actually, like many insects, they are believed to have appeared in the Carboniferous (about 300 million years ago), and looked a lot like they do today:
Can’t remember where I read it recently, but I believe that mantises and cockroaches are closely related. I do see the resemblance, especially when it comes to those long hairlike antennae, but mantises seem almost to possess an un-insectlike intelligence, very unlike a cockroach. That’s probably just an illusion, due to the fact they can turn their heads to look over their shoulders, like a tiny strange person.
I like mantises, too, and would keep them as pets if I could find any in our area.