A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
mantis
A mantis is a predatory insect that hunts by stillness. It holds its spined forelegs folded in front of it, waits, and strikes in about a twentieth of a second. It is the only insect that can turn its head to look behind it, and it has stereoscopic vision, judging distance with two eyes the way a person does, which almost no other invertebrate manages.
Etymology
The word is Greek for a prophet or a diviner, and it was given for the posture: the folded forelegs read as hands raised in prayer. That reading is nearly universal. The insect is a praying mantis in English, gottesanbeterin, God-worshipper, in German, and it carries similar names across Africa and Asia, several of which treat it as a bringer of guidance.
Notes
Researchers established the stereoscopic vision by fitting mantises with tiny colored glasses and showing them 3D films of prey, which is exactly as absurd as it sounds and which produced a clean result: The mantis struck at targets that existed only in the depth illusion. Its depth perception works on a different principle from a vertebrate’s, keying on movement rather than on matching detail between the two images.