Good BUGS

In a garden where creatures are free to prey on each other, the biological cycle plays out dramatically...

1. Praying mantis

Mantids can camouflage themselves so well in surrounding vegetation that you’ll fail to notice them. With their compound eyes on a large head that can rotate 180 ,̊ they can however see very well (anything from 2 – 15m) and will use their powerful legs to catch prey with lightning speed, just like an unsuspecting fruit fly. They use their mandibles to eat their prey alive and are also cannibalistic, eating each other if not mating. Birds, bats, spiders, snakes and frogs make a meal of these interesting insects named for their folded forelegs held closed together as if in prayer.

Diet: Flies, beetles, moths, crickets and aphids.

2. Rain spider

It takes a tough cookie not to scream in fright when a rain spider drops from a lush creeper at an open window onto a bed. It is a fearsome-looking, but harmless creature in brown or grey with a leg span of up to 100mm. The female keeps her eggs in a sac made from leaves bound with silk and will guard them protectively until the spiderlings hatch.

It is only when extremely provocated that she might bite a gardener – which is not at all poisonous and feels like a bee sting. Rain spiders are preyed on by birds and pompilid wasps.