Cleveland bug specialist mounts research project

CLEVELAND - A bug specialist is organizing a praying mantis collection from coast-to-coast to kick off a groundbreaking research project.

Gavin Svenson with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History tells The Plain Dealer that the collection is coming in boxes and glass vials from museums around the country.

The items, including the Carnegie Science Center's specimens already from Pittsburgh, join Svenson's set of 4,000 mantises plucked from their camouflaged hiding places on grass stems, tree branches and flower petals worldwide.

A week ago, Svenson took an East Coast swing, gathering the entire prized 9,000-mantis collection from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and samples from the American Museum of Natural History and the New York State Museum.

With the long-term loans, the Cleveland museum "will easily jump to the biggest assemblage of mantis specimens in the United States, and (will be) equivalent with the British Museum, Paris and Berlin, which are the other three major international collections," Svenson said.

The consolidation of mantis samples and the recent opening a $150,000 DNA lab at the museum, will aid the international effort Svenson is leading to rethink the mantis family tree.

"He's got a bold vision for how to really study this field, and how it drives not just a better understanding of mantises, but of evolution," said Cleveland museum director Evalyn Gates.

His mantis studies already have revealed surprises about how and when they evolved and spread. And the research has overturned some long-held beliefs about which groups within the widely varied mantis clan are most closely related.

"There's way more diversity than what anybody thought historically," Svenson told an audience of museum patrons.

"We think we can get to the bottom of this complicated puzzle through a major research effort," with the Cleveland museum at its epicenter.

The roughly 2,500 mantis species range from barely an inch to nearly a foot long.

Svenson and other researchers are studying what triggers a mantis to strike at prey, which could be a smaller insect, another mantis, or something as large as a frog or a bird.

"If a mantis is hungry, it is way more apt to strike at a diversity of things it encounters," including creatures much bigger than itself, Svenson said. But other factors affect the mantis' decision, too, including its target's direction of movement, and how well it stands out against the background.