ID por favor?

sickboy

New member
Got a new mantis and convinced him to show off for the camera.

Can anyone give me an ID? I'm confident it's a male, just not sure about how big he will get.

Thanks in advance.

BiggerThanYou2.jpg
 
cool

cool

cool looking meral spread by your smasher there. i think it feels threatened by your camera - LOL. what's the color of the meral spot?

btw, how do you know it's male?
 
The spot is black.

I'm basing the gender on this thread:

how to sex

Before dropping him intro his tank I could clearly see the pair of gonopods- my last mantis didn't have any.

Getting pictures of things like that now is a bit difficult. :)
 
mantis

mantis

ok, well, from the (admittedly blurry) pic, you probably know it's a Gonodactylid....obviously not Odontodactylus because of the color and head shape; it's not Gonodactylus chiragra looks like, which is a bit more robust, and the antennal scapes of mine looks diff than what i'm seeing in the pic....the usual Neogonodactylus wennerae has white meral spots, so that's not it....and G. ternatensis (which i used to have) has orangey/gold meral spots....G. smithii has purplish to dark purplish meral spot (which may look black?), and it has a propensity to make a meral spread, so my un-expert opinion is, if it's one of the common reef tank hitchhikers, it's probably this species.

if doc caldwell passes by, he'll probably nail it.

does it look similar to this?
http://www.blueboard.com/mantis/bio/images/threat.jpg
 
Yes, very much like that *except* for the white border on the spots. Just solid black (or purple- something very dark). Well, I suppose he's small enough, and since I can't get in the tank with anything to look _that_ closely at his spots that there could be lighter rings around the spots.

I'm not familiar enough with their anatomy to know the naming, however on his abdomen the segments are framed in a purple-ish/pink color.

Any opinions on potential size? He's about two inches right now. (conservatively)
 
size

size

all these types are pretty small sizewize (the biggest is probably G. chiragra, which i've seen at 10 cm or so)....if you do a search on G. smithii you'll find that max size accg to doc caldwell is around 8 cm (or 3.5 in)...hope you can get good photos...i read somewheres else in this forum that smithii has red colored spots or areas in its telson (again, accg to roy)...that, plus the purple/dark meral spot would clinch it as G. smithii.
 
G. ternatensis

G. ternatensis

G. ternatensis has orangey meral spots....i once had one:
http://www.blueboard.com/mantis/pics/gonodasj.htm

does this look like yours?...there is a definitive way to tell the two apart, but it involves looking for some ridges in the dorsal surface of the telson (tail plate) of the critter, which is how i id'ed mine at the time. G ternatensis has a series of 5 distinct bumps in that area (if i can find my stomatopod book sometime, i'll take a pic of the diagram and post it)

this is also another that i id'd (based on meral spot) as G. ternatensis (although i am not sure if the doc has visited that page yet)...

http://www.blueboard.com/mantis/pics/hoeppel.htm
 
Orange spots?

That's just it- everything about JEMichaelIV's mantis matches mine _except_ the meral spots. Weird.

Based on the way he's boring through the rock I can actually get a good look at this tail (a picture wouldn't make it with this terrible camera) so if you want to elaborate I can get a closer look.

The two links you added look like mine except there's more yellow- in the places where the mantis is yellowish on the pictures mine is very blue/green.

Could that be a gender thing?

I have some more pix at home I'll dig out, especially one of the tail.

I forget if they're any more blurry... :(
 
meral spot

meral spot

Actually, JEMIchael's pic seems to be G. ternatensis based on that spot, and i believe that orange meral spot is indicative of this species, and in fact may be used by males and females to key in to each other...if you look closely (and i admit it's a blurry pic too), you can see the meral spot as dark orange (I circled it in white):

http://www.blueboard.com/mantis/images/g_ternatensis.jpg

Then again, i may just be imagining that color - LOL. If he's around here, maybe he can clear it up because i admit that pic was not that clear.

this is like some detective novel :)

btw, i read somewheres (not sure if here) that in some stomatopods, the males tend to be darker colored than females, so this might explain the darker coloring of your male specimen.
 
sickboy, your mantis is a g.ternatensis.

i have one too.

you can clearly see the white bordered orange/yellow spot from your photo.

i think you're looking at the wrong spots :)
 
I suppose I should get my eyes checked.

Dreamscape is right, they are orange.

I dug through my older pics and it's pretty obivous.

Warning, blurry pics ahead:

meral1.jpg


meral2.jpg

meral3.jpg


It's pretty clear I was mistaking that black spot for the meral spot. I have one pic that's _much_ blurrier I won't subject everyone to that makes it more obvious.

I picked up this guy (calling him Marvin) at a LFS. They remembered my pestering them about mantis shrimp and held on to him for me.

As for size, I suppose I should expect 2-3 inches. right?

Not the 4-7 inch variety, I hope.

Thanks everyone for your help.... :)

(now if only everyones help would lead me to a better camera..... :) )
 
g ternatensis

g ternatensis

yep, even though the 3 pics are blurry, you can now see clearly the ornangey/yellow meral spot in the first two pics....good eyes, dreamscape!!!

chiragra and smithii seem to grow the largest, i cannot remember how big the G. ternatensis i had was....but, i just found a thread here where doc caldwell mentions these guys can get to 12 cm (around 5 inches)

with regards to the pics, maybe you need to use macro setting? the focus may be all that's at fault, not the camera.
 
It is always dangerous to identify a species from a photo. The characters that distinguish among Gonodactylaceus are mostly small and difficult to see. My guess is that this is not G. ternatenis. It is more likely a male G. falcatus (recently changed from G. mutatus). This is a hightly variable species that occurs from east Africa to Hawaii. It is sexually color dimorphic and most of this fits being a male G. f.

For the record, the largest gonodactylid ever recorded was a G. ternatensis that I had a few years ago. It measured over 12 cm.

Roy
 
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