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Animal Themes
Insects
Invertebrates

Mantids

Mantids
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 4 to 8
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   8.8

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    courtship, killers, merciless, relentless, mating, therefore, illustrate, hence, species, fully-grown, ruthless, temperate, rarely, mistaken, attach, scan
     content words:    Southeast Asia

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Other Languages
     Spanish: La Mantis Religiosa

Mantids   
1     Have you ever seen mantids on a hunt? A second ago, they seemed to be very inactive. Then, at a lightning speed, mantids strike and take a hold of a beetle with their two front legs that look more like two blades! Mantids rarely miss their target. Aside from their unusually long and powerful front legs, mantids have two other advantages that make them superb predators!
 
2     Mantids are the only insects that can turn their heads over 180 degrees, allowing them to scan for prey from one side to the other. To the horror of their victims, mantids' attacks always appear to come out of nowhere. Thanks to their camouflage outfits, mantids are often mistaken for twigs, leaves, or even flowers! Perhaps the best way to illustrate how good mantids are at disguising themselves is to observe two identical flower mantids of Southeast Asia that grow up on two different plants. The one living on a plant that blooms white flowers becomes white when it is fully-grown, and the one residing on a plant that blooms pink flowers becomes pink at its adult stage.
 
3     With about 2,000 different species, mantids are common insects in tropical and temperate regions. Mantids are merciless hunters and eat almost every living animal coming near them, including other mantids! While mantids usually attack smaller insects (such as grasshoppers, flies, mosquitoes, and moths), larger and more daring mantids expand their diet to also include frogs, lizards, and hummingbirds.

Paragraphs 4 to 5:
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