A mantis most people would walk straight past
On Christmas Eve 2024 I was out in the Dominican Republic when a praying mantis caught my eye. It was not one of the big, showy species. It was a modest animal that most people would have walked straight past, and it sat still long enough for its portrait before I left it in peace.
This is Musonia remota, a mantis of the family Thespidae in the order Mantodea. Thespids tend to be small and slender, built for a life among grass and low scrub, where their elongated bodies and dull, cryptic colours melt into the stems around them. Like every mantis, it is a patient ambush predator, folding its raptorial front legs and waiting for something edible to wander within reach. Its triangular head can swivel almost all the way around, which makes a mantis a famously hard subject to sneak up on, and this one seemed to know it.
Small thespids are easy to overlook, and that is half the fun of looking for mantises in the Caribbean. The Dominican Republic turns up a steady stream of them, but each new species is a small discovery, a reminder that the islands’ insect life still has plenty of quiet corners waiting to be appreciated.
The epithet remota comes from the Latin remotus, meaning distant or remote. It is a fitting word for a species that can sit right in front of you and still go unnoticed, quietly doing its hunting business in the margins of a Caribbean landscape.
