Researchers have identified three new-to-science species of snake mantises, two from Australia and one from Papua New Guinea, and figured out their distribution and behavior with the help of citizen scientists.
Matthew Connors, a Ph.D. candidate at James Cook University in Australia, led the effort to revisit the taxonomy of Kongobatha, a little-studied group of praying mantises known as snake mantises for the snake-like patterns on their wings. They’re also referred to as leaf-planking mantises, because they press their bodies against leaves to camouflage.
The blending in helps because they are both predators of insects, including flies and mosquitoes, and prey themselves. “They have this special organ right on their chest that is a sensory thing, and it helps them flatten themselves down really nicely against a leaf, so that they’re really hard for a predator to see,” Connors said in a news release.
Previously only two species of Kongobatha were known: one from Australia and another from Papua New Guinea. Now, there are three more, named K. serpens, K. spinosistyla and K. rufilinea.
To describe these three species, Connors collected new specimens of the mantises and sourced others from Australian and international museums and private collections.
He examined them under a microscope, focusing on male anatomical features called styli, which are a pair of small appendage-like structures located on the end of the abdomen, and may function in mating, although this remains a “mystery,” Connors told Mongabay by email.
The styli of snake mantises have many spines on them, Connors said. However, the pattern and number of spines differed between the species. “In one of our new species [K. spinosistyla], there are up to 60 spines crammed in on the surface of this structure … no other mantis species in the world has these types of structures,” he added.
The researchers also found that K. papua, previously only documented in Papua New Guinea, also occurs in Australia.
Apart from using museum specimens, the team also relied on photographs of mantises posted on citizen science platforms such as iNaturalist to help examine the insects’ geographic distribution, habitat use and behavior in the wild, Connors said.
The researchers learned, for example, one of the new mantises, K. serpens, is attracted to lights at night and is a common resident in suburban gardens in Brisbane and Sydney. It seems “to have adapted really well to living with humans,” Connors said in the release.
All four of the Australian Kongobatha mantises appear to be doing well. However, K. rufilinea, is known from only a single specimen collected in Papua New Guinea more than 50 years ago.
“We cannot protect what we don’t know about, but I have hope that this species is still out there, and formally naming and describing the species is the first step to ensuring its survival,” Connors said.
Banner image: Male and female Kongobatha spinosistyla in North Queensland. Image by Maurice Allan.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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