Opening abdomens:

Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving. Here this idea, whose memory lingers still over the kisses of man, is realised in its primal simplicity. No sooner has the union been accomplished than the male's abdomen opens, the organ detaches itself, dragging with itthe massof the entrails; the wings relax , and as though struck by lightning, the emptied body turns and turns on itself and sinks down into the abyss.

[Maurice Maeterlinck from The Life of the Bee 1901]

Images by Ernst Haeckel:

Simulating death when dead:

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: