Scientists have discovered how praying mantises kill birds.
An international group of scientists described as large insects from the order Bogomolovym prey on adult hummingbirds.
The authors analyzed 147 documented cases of attacks by insects, hummingbirds and other small birds on all continents except Antarctica.
It turned out that hunt birds, the representatives of the 12 major types of mantid. The victims were small birds, 24 species of passerine groups, stereopanic and kolibriobrá. The majority of incidents were recorded in the US, where quite a few different types of hummingbirds.
Praying mantises capture prey with its front legs, holding it between the femur and tibia. They begin to eat caught the bird when she was still alive. Most often, the predators bite the birds in the head or neck, sometimes they get hole in the head to get to the brain. In all reported cases the birds were hunting the female praying mantis, which are larger than males.
“They just kept birds and eat them while they are still alive, slowly, till there’s nothing left. It’s really impressive,” – said the ecologist Dietrich Mebs from Frankfurt University in Germany.
According to scientists, these insects can pose a threat to some populations of hummingbirds, but for species in General, these insects are not terrible.
“As if I didn’t look like this behavior, I don’t think it poses a threat to the survival of any species is a Hummingbird, because it doesn’t happen very often in relation to the total population,” – says one of the study’s authors, Sarah Emerson.
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