In March 2023 I found some eggs laid in rows on the branch of a red bud tree in our yard. I took a picture of it because it looked like the rows of eggs I'd found on one our back porch screens when I took them down for the winter in November 2022. I'd saved the eggs from the screen in a plastic pill bottle. Later I noticed the eggs on the red bud branch had rows of little holes along the side like some things had crawled out. I failed to take pictures of either the eggs on the screen or the rows of holes I later saw on the eggs on the red bud tree.
Eggs found on red bud tree branch March 2023
After I found the eggs on the tree I remembered the eggs in the pill bottle. I brought them up from the dark cellar where they had spent the winter, put a few drops of water inside, and put it on the kitchen window sill (which faces West). In May 2023 I noticed the pill bottle had become fuzzy inside and my first thought was it looked like mosquitos. When I looked closer I saw tiny mantises. I got my camera and took the pill bottle outside, opened it, and dumped the contents on a stack of red bricks.
Some of the mantises were still alive. One went over toward another kind of aggressively. I left them on top of a stack of bricks and they were gone the next day. End of story, but crappy photos of mantises presented as an exciting storyboard below. The first photo of the dead mantises half-hatched reminded me of the Hindenburg disaster and that provided the title to this post.
A mantis in the cap of a plastic pill bottle
A mantis surveying the carnage of the eggs and loose mantis body parts scattered on a red brick
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