And there’s still a bit of mystery about how the ladies hit so hard
Shown in slow motion, a giant female rainforest mantis unfolds her long, spiky legs into a position to swipe away a fly. At full speed, this female mantis strike only lasts about 50 to 100 milliseconds.
T. Buscher and others/Physiological entomology2026
If giant rainforest mantises went to kindergarten, little girl mantises wouldn’t look bigger and stronger than little boy mantises. Only at the end of Mantis High School will lady mantises become the larger gender. The females’ hunting strikes then become stronger than those of the males.
The first series of measurements of this mantis’ predatory strike, from childhood to adulthood, clarifies when its power and force diverge, a team from the University of Kiel in Germany reports in the March issue of Physiological Entomology. Researchers now have a new unanswered question. Mantises, especially adult females, hit the testing device harder than expected based on the size of a key muscle, says Thies Büscher, an entomologist in Kiel. So where does this extra power come from?
These Hierodula majuscula mantises, native to Australia, use this strength in ambush hunting. Instead of searching for prey, insects freeze in statue-like immobility. When an inattentive, edible object moves away, the mantids suddenly reanimate, snapping off specialized raptor legs in a lightning-fast attack.
This attack is not so much a killing punch as a body snatching, says Büscher. Mantises have no venom, but their mouthparts are sharp. (Yes, he was bitten. It’s no fun, but rodent bites hurt more.) What usually kills the captured prey, he says, is the loss of fluid when the mantis bites its still-living meal.
To measure the power of such strikes, the researchers placed a delicious fly larva in a small transparent box attached to an instrument measuring the force of the mantis attacks. “They are always hungry,” he said.
Hungry little mantises grow in stages. When their hardened outer covering becomes too tight, they increase in size. They typically require six molts for males and seven for females to reach their maximum size, spanning the length of an adult human hand. Even at this size, they rarely weigh more than 3.5 grams, or a little more than a US penny.
The youngest tested, which had molted only twice during their series of small growth spurts, hit the fly box with only about 2.5 millinewtons. However, adult males hit the target with around 70 millinewtons and adult females with around 196 millinewtons.
Although the punch strength of mantises can increase significantly from childhood to adulthood, other body characteristics, such as weight, change at different scales, leading to strange effects. “I’m interested in scaling,” says Büscher.
For example, striking force generally increases in proportion to the cross-sectional area of a muscle. This is simply a two-dimensional measurement, but insect bodies develop in three dimensions. Yet whole body weight in 3D increases faster than muscle area in 2D. So, for their size, some small wispy youngsters pack a (proportionately) bigger punch than larger hunters.
However, simply measuring the cross-sectional area of a particular muscle predicts that giant rainforest mantises should not be able to punch as hard as they do, says Büscher. Some other animals have evolved ways to store energy, such as increasing pressure on a latch and spring mechanism until it finally opens, releasing the stored energy. This workaround allows for athletic feats such as extreme speed during a mantis shrimp attack or the sudden somersault of a midge larva. Yet Büscher found no evidence of such a phenomenon in mantises and now suspects that there may be another muscle or overlooked anatomical part involved in some way. The hunt continues.
We know that what gets caught gets eaten, says evolutionary physiologist Christopher Oufiero of Towson University in Maryland. He didn’t measure the force of the strikes, but his lab calculated the speed at which 14 species of mantises feed, observing the insects catch more than 300 flies in their mouths.
The adult female mantises in his tests, all specialized in some form of camouflage, were found to be fast eaters not limited by their mouthparts, he and his colleagues reported in Ecology and Evolution in February 2026. Overall, the team concluded that the mantises can easily eat more than they need to survive. They feeds less like other insects and more like spiders.
