The fact is that there are hardly any reactions that it is not also able to perform when decapitated...in this condition, it can walk, regain its balance, move one of its threatened limbs autonomously, assume the spectral position, mate, lay eggs, build an ootheca, and, quite astonishingly, fall down in a false corpse-like immobility when confronted by danger or following a peripheral stimulation. I am deliberately using this indirect means of expressing myself because our language, it seems to me, has so much difficulty expressing, and our reason understanding, the fact that when dead, the mantis can simulate death.
[Roger Caillois on the Praying Mantis, from Space, Time and Perversion by Elizabeth Grosz 1995]
Artwork is by Hany Armanious:
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