‘Praying mantises are among the most frightening insects on the planet, equipped with powerful front legs which they use to snatch unwary insects, spiders, and even the odd amphibian or reptile. But as new research reveals, praying mantises are also proficient at capturing birds—which they do more often than we thought.
New research published in The Wilson Journal of Ornithology shows that small birds often fall victim to praying mantises, and that this behavior exists among many different mantis species around the world. Most cases of this insect-on-bird violence were documented in North America, where small birds—particularly hummingbirds—are snatched by the predatory insects when visiting feeders or house gardens…’
Source: Gizmodo
So we ought to call them “preying mantises”??
I have long been fascinated by rogue waves, finding them to be the stuff of nightmares (literally; as a child I had recurring dreams about being in the path of one). Well, now it appears there are rogue troughs as well:
‘With 30 pages of handwritten calculations, Duke postdoctoral fellow Sho Yaida has laid to rest a 30-year-old mystery about the nature of glass and “disordered” materials at low temperatures. They may in fact be a new state of matter …’