A Mantis

When my friend in Italy heard that I had finally procured myself a mantis, he rifled off an e-mail — "How dare you begin your plans of world domination without me!"

Currently Sancho the praying mantis is calmly resting on a Uniball Vision pen that I have placed in her jar. She has eaten countless fruit flies, and she is still so young that you can see the black corpses as little dots in her translucent body. She is monstrous.

Sancho and her brother, Fatty McFatterson, are the only survivors of the several-weeks-long battle of attrition and cannibalism that came after the hatching. It was grim. I am proud of them.

Sancho kills without bloodlust. The actual capturing of prey seems casual, and as soon as the fruit fly is in her grasp, Sancho will begin methodically chewing on whatever part of the fly that is closest. You can watch as the fly's struggling slowly short circuits into occasional spasms, and then to stillness.

Still like a sandwich.

Perhaps you are not aware of some of the augmentations that mantids are born with. Here's a quick list of features:

• Inner ear chamber tuned to pick up the bat-sonar frequencies. If the mantis is in flight, and detects a bat bouncing a signal off of her, she will enter into an erratic spiral, drop to the ground, or in some species, fly very low to hide her in the ground clutter, much like a low flying cruise missile.
• Small hairs that sprout from her "neck" and "shoulders" — these rub together and give the mantis a precise reading on the exact angle her head is cocked. Increases raptorial accuracy dramatically.
• Specially modified spines on the forelegs which lock into each other, creating a significantly stronger grip.

When Sancho gets bigger, I will begin feeding her crickets. Then, once these are easy prey for her, I will begin the combat aspect of her existence — wasps, spiders, angry beetles will soon face off against the raptorial might of my pet.

Then once I have perfected the growth formula, we will move into small mammal territory, perhaps even birds. There are already mantids in the jungle that eat birds and lizards — but not on command like Sancho. If this phase proves successful, the head mounted laser and electro-claw augmentations will be implemented simultaneously with the alpha lab in Tucson facilitating the cloning process in earnest.

Covert Ops Mantis Death Squad (COMDS) is go, my Italian friend. And it's coming your way. That's Hospitaliano!

— Dan Norton)