Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: How many eggs does a praying mantis lay?
The mating season in temperate climates typically takes place in autumn, while in tropical areas, mating can occur at any time of the year. To mate following courtship, the male usually leaps onto the female's back, clasping her thorax and wing bases with his forelegs. He then arches his abdomen to deposit and store sperm in a special chamber near the tip of the female's abdomen. The female lays between 10 and 400 eggs, depending on the species. Eggs are typically deposited in a froth mass-produced by glands in the abdomen. This froth hardens, creating a protective capsule, which together with the egg mass is called an ootheca. Depending on the species, the ootheca can be attached to a flat surface, wrapped around a plant, or even deposited in the ground. Despite the versatility and durability of the eggs, they are often preyed on, especially by several species of parasitoid wasps. In a few species, mostly ground and bark mantises in the family Tarachodidae, the mother guards the eggs. The cryptic "Tarachodes maurus" positions herself on bark with her abdomen covering her egg capsule, ambushing passing prey and moving very little until the eggs hatch. An unusual reproductive strategy is adopted by Brunner's stick mantis from the southern United States; no males have ever been found in this species, and the females breed parthenogenetically. The ability to reproduce by parthenogenesis has been recorded in at least two other species, "Sphodromantis viridis" and "Miomantis" sp., although these species usually reproduce sexually. In temperate climates, adults do not survive the winter and the eggs undergo a diapause, hatching in the spring.
All dinosaurs lay amniotic eggs with hard shells made mostly of calcium carbonate. Eggs are usually laid in a nest. Most species create somewhat elaborate nests, which can be cups, domes, plates, beds scrapes, mounds, or burrows. Some species of modern bird have no nests; the cliff-nesting common guillemot lays its eggs on bare rock, and male emperor penguins keep eggs between their body and feet. Primitive birds and many non-avialan dinosaurs often lay eggs in communal nests, with males primarily incubating the eggs. While modern birds have only one functional oviduct and lay one egg at a time, more primitive birds and dinosaurs had two oviducts, like crocodiles. Some non-avialan dinosaurs, such as "Troodon", exhibited iterative laying, where the adult might lay a pair of eggs every one or two days, and then ensured simultaneous hatching by delaying brooding until all eggs were laid.
The queen lays less than 1.5 eggs per day on average. She lays eggs parallel to the construction of the cells. She may lay two eggs in the same cell, even if there are open cells—in this case, only one egg develops. However, no more than 20% of the cells are empty at a time. However, a queen does not reuse cells once an egg has occupied them.
The moths will emerge from the pupae within 8 to 12 days, during mid-June to August. Adult spruce budworm are medium-sized (15 mm in length) and dichromatic, exhibiting gray and rust colors. The wings have silvery patches and are 21 mm to 30 mm in wingspan. Peak activity occurs during the later afternoon and early evening. After emerging, the adults will mate and lay eggs in July or August.
Silk moths lay eggs on specially prepared paper. The eggs hatch and the caterpillars (silkworms) are fed fresh mulberry leaves. After about 35 days and 4 moltings, the caterpillars are 10,000 times heavier than when hatched and are ready to begin spinning a cocoon. A straw frame is placed over the tray of caterpillars, and each caterpillar begins spinning a cocoon by moving its head in a pattern. Two glands produce liquid silk and force it through openings in the head called spinnerets. Liquid silk is coated in sericin, a water-soluble protective gum, and solidifies on contact with the air. Within 2–3 days, the caterpillar spins about 1 mile of filament and is completely encased in a cocoon. The silk farmers then heat the cocoons to kill them, leaving some to metamorphose into moths to breed the next generation of caterpillars. Harvested cocoons are then soaked in boiling water to soften the sericin holding the silk fibers together in a cocoon shape. The fibers are then unwound to produce a continuous thread. Since a single thread is too fine and fragile for commercial use, anywhere from three to ten strands are spun together to form a single thread of silk.
The largest recorded egg is from a whale shark, and was in size. Whale shark eggs typically hatch within the mother. At and up to , the ostrich egg is the largest egg of any living bird, though the extinct elephant bird and some dinosaurs laid larger eggs. The bee hummingbird produces the smallest known bird egg, which weighs half of a gram (around 0.02 oz). Some eggs laid by reptiles and most fish, amphibians, insects and other invertebrates can be even smaller.
Gestation lasts from 65 to 83 days and normally results in the birth of a litter of three to six pups, although larger litters of up to 10 have been reported. The young are born blind and helpless and initially weigh . The eyes open after 14 to 19 days and the pups first emerge from the nativity den shortly thereafter. The young are weaned at around four weeks and reach sexual maturity at one year. They can live for up to 10 years in captivity.
One disadvantage to making nests is that most, if not all, of the nest-maker’s offspring are concentrated in one place, making them highly vulnerable to predation. Once a predator finds a nest, it can plunder it cell by cell. A variety of parasitic wasps, ranging from extremely tiny chalcidoid wasps to larger, bright green chrysidid wasps attack mud dauber nests. They pirate provisions and offspring as food for their own offspring.
Merian was one of the first naturalists to observe insects directly. Merian collected and observed live insects and created detailed drawings. In her time insects still had a reputation as "beasts of the devil" and the process of metamorphosis was largely unknown. While a handful of scholars had published empirical information on the insect, moth and butterfly life cycle, the widespread contemporary believe was that they were "born of mud" by spontaneous generation. Merian documented evidence to the contrary and described the life cycles of 186 insect species.
Although the name might imply it, a queen bee does not directly control the hive. Her sole function is to serve as the reproducer. A well-mated and well-fed queen of quality stock can lay about 1,500 eggs per day during the spring build-up—more than her own body weight in eggs every day. She is continuously surrounded by worker bees who meet her every need, giving her food and disposing of her waste. The attendant workers also collect and then distribute queen mandibular pheromone, a pheromone that inhibits the workers from starting queen cells.
The Fringillidae are all seed-eaters with stout conical bills. They have similar skull morphologies, nine large primaries, 12 tail feathers and no crop. In all species, the female builds the nest, incubates the eggs, and broods the young. Finches are divided into two subfamilies, the Carduelinae, containing around 28 genera with 141 species and the Fringillinae containing a single genus, "Fringilla", with three species: the chaffinch ("F. coelebs"), the Tenerife blue chaffinch ("F. teydea"), and the brambling ("F. montifringilla"). Fringilline finches raise their young almost entirely on arthropods, while the cardueline finches raise their young on regurgitated seeds.
The queen is the only sexually mature female in the hive and all of the female worker bees and male drones are her offspring. The queen may live for up to three years or more and may be capable of laying half a million eggs or more in her lifetime. At the peak of the breeding season, late spring to summer, a good queen may be capable of laying 3,000 eggs in one day, more than her own body weight. This would be exceptional however; a prolific queen might peak at 2,000 eggs a day, but a more average queen might lay just 1,500 eggs per day. The queen is raised from a normal worker egg, but is fed a larger amount of royal jelly than a normal worker bee, resulting in a radically different growth and metamorphosis. The queen influences the colony by the production and dissemination of a variety of pheromones or "queen substances". One of these chemicals suppresses the development of ovaries in all the female worker bees in the hive and prevents them from laying eggs.
The largest social wasp is the Asian giant hornet, at up to in length. The various tarantula hawk wasps are of a similar size and can overpower a spider many times its own weight, and move it to its burrow, with a sting that is excruciatingly painful to humans. The solitary giant scoliid, "Megascolia procer", with a wingspan of 11.5 cm, has subspecies in Sumatra and Java; it is a parasitoid of the Atlas beetle "Chalcosoma atlas". The female giant ichneumon wasp "Megarhyssa macrurus" is long including its very long but slender ovipositor which is used for boring into wood and inserting eggs. The smallest wasps are solitary chalcid wasps in the family Mymaridae, including the world's smallest known insect, "Dicopomorpha echmepterygis" (139 micrometres long) and "Kikiki huna" with a body length of only 158 micrometres, the smallest known flying insect.
This is a bird which breeds in sub-tropical semi-desert with a few trees, such as acacia. It winters in open woodland or grassland. As the name suggests, bee-eaters predominantly eat insects, especially bees, wasps and hornets, which are caught in the air by sorties from an open perch. However, this species probably takes more dragonflies than any other food item. Its preferred hunting perch is telephone wires if available.
Common insects that prey on wasps include praying mantises, dragonflies, centipedes, beetles and moths. In fact, large wasps will even prey on smaller wasps. Spiders will also capture wasps in their webs and eat them. Predatory reptiles and amphibians, such as frogs, lizards, toads, and salamanders see the wasp as just another opportunistic meal and do not differentiate them from other insects, despite their feared sting. Birds that regularly consume bugs will also eat wasps. Other creatures that eat wasps, particularly mammals, are more interested in the larvae rather than the adults.
The female common ostrich lays her fertilised eggs in a single communal nest, a simple pit, deep and wide, scraped in the ground by the male. The dominant female lays her eggs first, and when it is time to cover them for incubation she discards extra eggs from the weaker females, leaving about 20 in most cases. A female common ostrich can distinguish her own eggs from the others in a communal nest. Ostrich eggs are the largest of all eggs, though they are actually the smallest eggs relative to the size of the adult bird — on average they are long, wide, and weigh , over 20 times the weight of a chicken's egg and only 1 to 4% the size of the female. They are glossy cream-coloured, with thick shells marked by small pits.
Most larvae spin a silken cocoon in the leaves of a preferred host plant or in leaf litter on the ground, or crevices in rocks and logs. While only moderately close relatives to the silkworm ("Bombyx mori") among the Lepidoptera, the cocoons of most larger saturniids can be gathered and used to make silk fabric. However, larvae of some species – typically Ceratocampinae, like the regal moth ("Citheronia regalis") and the imperial moth ("Eacles imperialis"), burrow and pupate in a small chamber beneath the soil. This is common in the Ceratocampinae and Hemileucinae. Unlike most silk moths, those that pupate underground do not use much silk in the construction. Once enclosed in the cocoon, the caterpillar sheds the larval skin and becomes a pupa, and the pupa undergoes metamorphosis for about 14 days, at which point it either emerges or goes into diapause. During metamorphosis, respiratory systems will stay intact, the digestive system will dissolve, and reproductive organs will take form.
Although the average lifespan of a queen in most subspecies is three to five years, reports from the German-European black bee subspecies previously used for beekeeping indicate that a queen can live up to eight years. Because a queen's store of sperm is depleted near the end of her life, she begins laying more unfertilized eggs; for this reason, beekeepers often replace queens every year or two.
Wasps first appeared in the fossil record in the Jurassic, and diversified into many surviving superfamilies by the Cretaceous. They are a successful and diverse group of insects with tens of thousands of described species; wasps have spread to all parts of the world except for the polar regions. The largest social wasp is the Asian giant hornet, at up to in length; among the largest solitary wasps is a group of species known as tarantula hawks, along with the giant scoliid of Indonesia ("Megascolia procer"). The smallest wasps are solitary chalcid wasps in the family Mymaridae, including the world's smallest known insect, with a body length of only , and the smallest known flying insect, only long.
The act of reproduction, regarding the female, leads to an increase of digestive enzymes. This allows her to eat more prey and to stock more nutrients. The digestive enzymes then start to digest the inside of the organism itself, except for the heart, guts, and mostly the ovaries. Once the offspring are born, and until the mother dies, the mother regurgitates for two weeks the fluids stocked inside as highly nutritive food for the progeny. Ninety-five per cent of the mother's mass is digested by the offspring. They will grow to three times their original size between their birth and dispersion. During the period when female spiders are caring for their hatched offspring, the mothers do not eat, and their offspring only eat the food that the mother regurgitates along with the mother's body at the end of this time.
This bee lives in underground nests, preferably in or around wooden areas and gardens. Nests can be anywhere from 6 inches to a foot below the surface. Tunnels traveling to the nest range from 9 inches to 4 feet long. "B. bimaculatus" can also nest above ground or in cavities. Bees do not build nests and instead rely on finding abandoned rodent dens, hollow logs, suitable man-made structures, or tussocks. Queens will hibernate in loose dirt or rotting logs.
Most research regarding egg laying in the genus "Padogobius" relates to "P. martensi." Egg laying begins once the male has cleaned the underside of the rock of his nest. Once the female has navigated her way into the nest, she assumes a spawning position, in which her belly turns to the ceiling of the hollow. The female then lays on average 170 to 410 elongate shaped eggs per nest. While she is laying her eggs, the male periodically turns upside down to fertilize the eggs. This process takes approximately one hour, after which the female leaves the nest and she will be able to produce another clutch of eggs roughly 30 days later. In these polygynous fish, males will except eggs from many females, as observed with 2 to 3 sets of eggs at multiple stages of development in one nest. Larger males can reproduce more times and are able to obtain more females over the entire mating season. The male’s reproductive success is therefore measured by how many individual clutches he has under his care in his nest.
The females lay their eggs on trees, shrubs, rocks, vehicles, and plants of many types. She typically lays about 500 eggs. The eggs are covered with a peachy fuzz that can cause serious rashes if touched by bare skin or fur. Then the female leaves to eat, while her eggs are protected. She does not live to see her offspring.
In the monogamous species, the mantis shrimps remain with the same partner up to 20 years. They share the same burrow and may be able to coordinate their activities. Both sexes often take care of the eggs (biparental care). In "Pullosquilla" and some species in "Nannosquilla", the female lays two clutches of eggs - one that the male tends and one that the female tends. In other species, the female looks after the eggs while the male hunts for both of them. After the eggs hatch, the offspring may spend up to three months as plankton.
The female lays 18 to 50 eggs at a time. While rare, up to 129 eggs have been found within a single nest, presumably from several layings. They lay their eggs in two layers, with a slight temperature difference between the two layers. This will result in a more even ratio of males and females. The caiman does not have sex chromosomes, but instead depends on temperature to determine the ratio of male and female offspring. Eggs at warmer temperatures (32 °C or higher) develop into females and eggs at cooler temperatures (31 °C or lower) develop into males.