Praying Mantis in Silver Artemisia

This was taken at a house I no longer live in; this house sat on a creek bed. A consequence of this was that the front of the house was usually covered in spiders (I suffer arachnophobia).

One year, I found a praying mantis in my backyard and transported it to my front porch where I had a variety of plants. I was delighted to find that the lovely mantis (which I promptly named Cassandra, as mantis is Greek for "prophet") ate most of the spiders so I made sure that Cassie was carefully out of the way when I watered/weeded/deadheaded.

The next year, I found that I had four praying mantises living around my front porch and they happily munched on spiders too.

End result: the praying mantis is now one of my favorite insects.