About the Mantis Study Group Website
This site is intended as a resource for anybody working on praying mantids. It is hoped that all authors will co-operate by posting their publications on this website and thus make them available for anyone to download.
A Cover picture
It is rare for a mantis to be featured on the cover of a journal. One recently appeared in the Sepilok Bulletin, volume 12 (June 2010). The photo is taken from a paper in the journal and shows: "Coxa and femur of the praying mantid, Theopompa tosta (Photo: Philip E. Bragg)". The paper is A review of the Liturgusidae of Borneo (Insecta: Mantodea) and the abstract of this paper can be found in the literature database.
Material on this site
The material on this site falls into four main categories: General information pages, a Database of Publications (including some which are available to download), a complete set of MSG Newsletters, and Photographs of mantids.
It is intended that there will be no restrictions on who may download material. The only restrictions are that the copyright of material on this site remains with the author. Downloaded material may be used for private study but cannot be used for commercial purposes without the express permission of the copyright owner.
To add to this site you will need to log in as a user and be given contributor status. At present, because of issues with the development system, we are not accepting new contributors.
A brief history of the Mantis Study Group
The Mantis Study Group (MSG) was founded by Phil Bragg on 18th May 1996 when a meeting was held in conjunction with the Blattodea Culture Group at Dudley Zoo. The group rapidly expanded and there were more than 50 members when the first Mantis Study Group Newsletter was produced in August 1996, and over 100 members by the end of the year.
For the first four years there was plenty of material being written for the quarterly newsletters. However, by 2000 contributions were diminishing and in mid 2001 there was nothing to put in the August issue; the scarcity of articles continued and after the combined May & August 2002 issue the next did not appear until August 2003. By this stage it was clear the MSG newsletter could not continue and no further subscriptions were collected. There were no more until Newsletter 27 in October 2007; this was produced as the final newsletter to tidy up a few loose ends and to publish an index to the Newsletters.
For several years, people who had been involved in the MSG would stand around at entomological meetings and mutter about trying to relaunch the MSG, but based on the internet rather than a printed newsletter. After waiting a couple of years, in the hope that someone else would do it, Phil Bragg took up the offer of this website which is hosted by the Natural History Museum, London. Phil Bragg and Ed Baker began work on the site on 29th April 2008. In 2010 after frustration with the repeated changes to the Scratchpad system, on which the site is based, work on the site was suspended. In early 2016 Phil Bragg returned to try to sort out the problems and restore the lost content; this has been only partially successful: content is present but some of the menus are missing so finding content, especially the photographs, is difficult.