Charles

A few weeks back, one of Dave's coworkers found a praying mantis on one of the chairs outside at the Coffee Club. Reinforcements were called in and Dave was ordered to get rid of it. Instead of killing it, he scooped it into a plastic container and decided, before asking his anti-insect wife, it would be a wonderful pet to have at home.


I was working at the theater and received a text saying he had just seen something incredibly amazing and couldn't wait to show me when I got home. Lots of crazy ideas immediately surged through my brain, none including a praying mantis.

I get home and there it was, the container with it's prisoner, in all it's glory. I was needless to say, a little disappointed. But once Dave fed him a fly, my feelings for Charles grew. He was quite incredibly in the way he stalked his soon-to-be dead prey. When Charles first joined the family, he was small with and ugly brown color to his skin.

(In the picture above, Charles is hanging upside down on the right. If you look closely, you can see the dead skin on the bottom of the pot.)

But once we transfered him to a fish bowl with a proper plant for him to play on, he instantly molted. And I mean instantly. The same day we put him in the fish bowl with the plant, within hours, he had shed his skin and standing there with a new green glow and much larger than before. We have fed him flies, spiders and even a bee. That was intense! He grabbed onto the stinger and started chomping on a wing so the bee couldn't fly away. It took him forever to eat the whole thing.

Please excuse the racket in the background. I was stirring batter for Swedish pancakes for breakfast.