The Mantis Diet section explains what praying mantises eat and how they hunt. Praying mantises are carnivorous predators, and they usually capture live prey with their powerful, spiny front legs. Their diet often includes flies, moths, crickets, grasshoppers, bees, butterflies, spiders, and many other small animals, depending on the mantis’s size and species. Larger mantises may sometimes catch small vertebrates, but most everyday garden observations involve insect prey. These guides also explain what baby mantises eat, how often mantises feed, whether they eat dead insects, and why they may sometimes eat each other. This section is useful for readers curious about mantis hunting behavior, garden ecology, and feeding habits.