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This cool creature might look like a wasp and act like a mantis, but the mantisfly is neither (video)

2022-06-22 00:00:00

Check out the beautifully shot insect below, which I ran across on Reddit. With its yellow and brown-striped body and its extendable, grasping forelegs, it looks like a cross between a wasp and a mantis. But nope, it's neither. As I just found out, it's actually a Mantispid (or mantisfly or mantidfly), which are predators without stingers found from Costa Rica to Canada. I wonder how many of these creatures I've seen and mistook for a wasp?

Click to expand

Here's another cool video on mantisflies, a year old, from YouTube, in which the impersonator meets a real wasp:

Front page thumbnail image: Narupon Nimpaiboon / shutterstock.com
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