I always picture Leafers as my most motherly, protective mantis. This is specifically rooted in one incident: I took a look into Leafers' cage and she was suddenly paper thin. She'd been fairly plump the day before, so I was sort of staring at her trying to figure out why the sudden change when I noticed the egg sac right next to her. I reached in and tried to pick her up, and she whirled around and snapped my finger in a way that wasn't at all normal for her.
I put it down to maternal aggression and left her alone. As it turns out, mantises don't exhibit maternal aggression. And in the one other case I've heard of in which it did, it turned out that it was actually a symptom of some deadly disease that had happened to coincide with the mantid's pregnancy.
I just like to think that Leafers was different. Allie was certainly different.
Leafers was a gift from my Valiant Girls teacher, Sister Ramirez. I had been talking about my interest in mantids in class for a while, and she caught one at her house, so she figured I would like it. She gave Leafers to me in a red Solo cup with plastic wrap over the top at church. I was originally going to name her Amy, or perhaps it was Rachel, but ultimately I ended up naming her Leafers after a Khan Academy avatar.
Leafers died sometime before Halloween 2017.
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