PRAYING MANTISES ARE EATING BIRD BRAINS ALL OVER THE WORLD!

People who are deathly afraid of all insects and creepy-crawlers have probably had nightmares of blood-thirsty giant bugs with a taste for meat. Then you wake up, you check for spiders under your bed, and you relax.

Well, don't get too comfortable folks – because this insane bug hunger is more widespread than you think, except this time, we're referring to praying mantises.

You heard it right – praying mantises are catching, consuming and devouring the brains of birds all over the world! 

Bird-eating mantises are rarely seen by humans, but the phenomenon was strange enough to get a group of zoologists in Switzerland and the US to investigate! 

You may not know this, but praying mantises are carnivorous – and voracious hunters. Such a contrast to heir sweet and peaceful name, right?

The researchers pored over 147 incidents of mantis-on-bird predation in the hopes of finding clues about this behaviour.

"Most experienced birders and ornithologists have at least heard about this behaviour, but most backyard birders are still shocked to hear about it," said Kenn Kaufman, a field editor at the National Audubon Society. "One of the bird magazines published a photo of a mantis munching on a hummingbird a few years back, and as you might imagine, some readers totally lost their shit over it."

The group's findings in the study were recently published in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology and suggested that mantises worldwide are munching some unsuspecting avians. 

Praying mantises were observed eating 24 different species of birds across 14 families. Nearly 70% of accounts happened in North America, where tiny hummingbirds were the most common prey. States with the highest incidents of mantis-on-bird attacks included New York, North Carolina, Texas, Arizona and California, according to the study.

"In the older literature, there are all sorts of anecdotes of mantises eating bizarre prey, such as centipedes and poisonous spiders, but these were usually 'Gladiator' encounters where investigators would throw together a mantis and another fearsome invertebrate in a jar or cage," said Michael Maxwell, the study's co-author and a behavioural ecologist at National University. 

With video sites like YouTube, it has become easier for modern scientists to collect footage of mantises capturing birds in the wild. So, the idea to review the reports of these attacks came from wanting "to sort out who is predator and who is prey," Maxwell added. 

"For many of us, the most surprising thing about the new study is the range of non-hummingbirds recorded as mantis prey," Kaufman said. "The others are all very small songbirds, but still, some of them must weigh as much as one-third of an ounce, which seems like a lot for any insect to deal with."

An interesting fact in the study was that all of the mantises involved were identified as female. That is not to say that female mantises are more aggressive than males, but they do engage in sexual cannibalism when they are very hungry. There have even been two observations of female mantises feeding on a bird while mating with a male at the same time. 

But remember folks, all of this doesn't mean you have to go around killing praying mantises. They're by no means a bigger threat to hummingbirds than habitat loss.

"As weird/gruesome as the behaviour seems, I don't think it represents a threat to the survival of any hummingbird species, because it doesn't happen very often relative to the total population," Kaufman said. "So I'd say it's an interesting phenomenon but not a conservation concern."

So when you see a mantis devouring the brains of a bird, maybe stay out of it – nature is less predictable than you'd think!