Exotic Species at FPS

Exotic Species at FPS

Bas, a student in 5B, has always been an avid amateur entomologist, and in 2019 he found a strange looking praying mantis in the FPS playground. 

He thought it looked different to any other praying mantis he had found before. We took a photo and uploaded it to an app called QuestaGame, which helps users identify animals and provides a database of sightings for researchers to use. The QuestaGame staff responded straight away, and said that it was a rare sighting of an invasive, carnivorous South African species called Miomantis caffra (see picture).

We all thought this was very interesting but had forgotten about it until a PhD student called Matthew Connors from James Cook University contacted us last year. He is an expert in orthoptera (grasshoppers and praying mantises) and uses citizen science apps to map their distribution. He found Bassie’s photo and asked if he could use it in a scientific journal paper, and in return, he would involve Bas as a co-author.

The paper was published in the Journal of Orthoptera Research. Bas is pretty chuffed about this (it’s not every day a 10-year-old gets published in a scientific journal) and given that the critter was found at the school, we thought you might be interested to know that the FPS playground harbours some exotic species!