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Tyson has Matured

Tyson gave me a surprise this evening. Please note that I still don't know what sex Tyson is - I originally suspected female, but now I'm not sure. For the purposes of this post I will refer to Tyson as a "he", as his name is masculine. I may update his gender in later posts.

Tyson is one of my two smaller mantises - a Yunnan flower mantis. He's just over an inch long, with an olive green and white body, and lovely purple eyes. I always knew that he was going to be smaller than Catchy, but I have to confess, I thought he'd get bigger than he has done.

I have been waiting on a delivery of fruit flies for my smaller critters and they finally arrived today, so I was going from tank to tank, spritzing the smaller cages and then dropping some fruit flies in for them. I don't have many critters that still need fruitflies - the two smaller mantises, Loki my dwarf tarantula sling, and Pratt my curly hair sling. The two slings are about a centimeter across, diagonally, maybe slightly larger. This is how big Tyson was at his last feed:
As you can see, he's not especially large. I imagined that he had several molts left to go before he reached adulthood, and a size of 4.5 to 5.5cm long. Apparently I was wrong, because this is what Tyson looks like now:
As you can see, he has developed the large wings of a mature mantis - he hasn't long since come out of his old exoskeleton in these pictures, so he is quite pale. After a bit of time he should darken up again. He has two pairs of wings now - the top pair are green and they have the "eye spot" on them - It reminds me of what would happen if you were to ask an AI bot to draw a picture of Hello Kitty! The second pair of wings, under the first pair, are currently a pale pink. I will endeavor to get a photograph of this at some point, but right now he is keeping them tucked in very tightly.
This abrupt jump into maturity has left me feeling a little sad. On the one hand, Tyson has turned into a very beautiful adult and I am very pleased to have been able to get him to this stage - I lost his companion, Evander, several months ago after he went on a hunger strike. So this is great news. But on the other hand, now that he is an adult, his days are numbered. Yunnan flower mantises take about 5 months to reach maturity, and live for an average of 8 months in captivity. This seems to be reasonably accurate as he has been in my care for approximately four months, and obviously is now an adult. I expect that he will live for approximately eight to twelve weeks from this point. I will be very sad to lose him, but also very glad that he got to this point.
In the meantime it would be nice if he could achieve his end goal and find a partner mantis, but I don't know any fellow mantis keepers. I could reach out on social media to find out if anyone has any potential mates for him, but we will see. If he continues to eat and thrive, then it may not be necessary, as long as he is happy.
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