I’m still really pleased with this picture, many years later. It’s absolutely the best I’ve ever managed with focus stacking under tricky conditions. The middle of the praying mantis got slightly blown out and though I got a shot of the rear torso in focus, enough of the middle-rear wasn’t in focus in any shot and that just doesn’t look right when you combine the whole series.
I mentioned a few weeks back that most insects just can’t be photographed easily in the wild with a macro lens and focus stacking, but the exception is if there’s some reason why they’re motionless. Really early in the morning on a colder spring or autumn day, you might spot a flying insect or other fast-mover just waiting for the sun to warm things up. They’ll still react if you move too quickly near them but otherwise you’ve got a chance. The sugar water trick I mentioned will also still a lot of insects while they suck the whole thing up.
And then there’s the predators who hunt by staying still. I’d actually netted this mantis in my garden so that I could go get my camera and tripod. When I let it out, one strand of the netting fabric had stuck to its left arm. It stayed mostly still, in the mode of a mantis, occasionally trying to get the strand of fabric off its arm, which it did with great care and fastidiousness.
Preying mantises, along with fireflies, were a great source of wonder to me when I first moved out to the eastern United States to go to college. There are mantid species around in western environments, but I never saw one when I was growing up. You don’t see mantises all that often here, but I think they’re pretty common—it’s just that they’re often hard to see because of coloration, because they hold still, and because they’re often deep in vegetation. I see maybe two a year, mostly while hiking, but some of them right around Swarthmore—there was one on a busy pathway just this last spring, looking characteristically willing to fight anybody who got too much in its face.
Anthropomorphism is always an empirical mistake if you really want to understand a particular animal (whether as a species or an individual) but mantises really do feel like they have a discernible mind, that they are thinking and evaluating and deciding on their next option, rather than a predictable instinctive reaction to a stimulus like a hulking primate finger getting too close.