Ootheca! Ummmm what?

Looks far out, doesn’t it? Today, Locryn and I found an ootheca for his biology lesson! We get a fair number of them in our yard. Ootheca?? What in the world are you teaching your toddler?? It looks like an alien!

An ootheca is an egg case made by mollusks, cockroaches, and mantises. This particular ootheca fixed to the side of an old wheelbarrow is an egg case for a praying mantis! It contains between 50 and 200 individual eggs!!

Praying mantises are amazing for your garden! They eat aphids, beetles, caterpillars, flies, grasshoppers, and mosquitoes. If you don’t have a good natural population of mantis already, you can purchase mantis oothecas online as a natural pesticide!