Charlotte Stevenson

The Molt

It was, but it wasn’t. All the details were there—the undulating texture of brown, segmented skin, and needle-sharp, serrated forearms—but this was not actually a mantid, colloquially called a praying mantis. This was just a casing. Just an empty shell. Just a notification to me, as the owner of this sunny porch, that a mantid had sat here. Although the molt was translucent, the life-like shape of the oversized eyes perched at opposing points of its triangular head still seemed to stare. But it was gone, leaving a ghost in its place.

I did that once before. I molted in a car, many years ago, riding home from Kaiser Oakland Hospital without my son. I was there, but I wasn’t. I was back in the hospital with my son’s body, yet another shell. I have a visual memory of the drive—billboards with movies like How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy—but no auditory memory. No memory of voices in the car. No memory of the likely sounds that summer day — traffic, machinery, seagulls. I remember having the feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like an anxiety-producing internal hum. My molt held my spot, but I was long gone. Long gone from that car. Long gone from that porch.

I didn’t know mantids existed in the Sierra Nevada mountains where I now lived. In fact, there are four species, and I was holding the molt of a native species, Stagmomantis californica, obvious from its fatter, segmented abdomen that curled upward like a drying, brown, madrone leaf. Judging from its inch-long size, this mantid had molted several times before and would still molt again before its final act of laying eggs on a branch this fall. Mantids, at least here in Northern California, do not live longer than a year. The eggs survive the winter, but the adults do not.           

A mantid knows when it is going to molt. It climbs to a secure location, hanging upside down to allow gravity to help loosen the outer layer of tissue from its body. The mantid will not eat for several days prior, staying still and preparing. Well—I imagine there is preparation. There must be some internal awareness that something is happening as it locates a spot and refrains from eating. I imagine that it knows something is changing.

Aspens are always the first to know. Their small, heart-shaped leaves will begin to quake on an otherwise still day like they are passing secrets we have not yet heard. Aspens know a storm is coming long before we feel the change in pressure or see trees getting greener against a darkening blue horizon.

Based on autopsy reports, my son, Rhys, died inside of me approximately 24 hours before delivery. There was no warning, though. No change of weather. No ominous colors. No mantis-smarts to know that a change was coming from within. But even if I didn’t see or feel the warning signs, how could I not have known the exact moment he died? How could I not have felt it in every cell of my body? For all the intelligence we credit to our advanced species, I can’t help but feel so unintelligent, so unaware, that I didn’t know when a heart stopped beating inside me. Why couldn’t I have been like a mantis or aspen and felt a shudder of the incoming storm?

I wanted to find the mantid. I had evidence of her existence, but I wanted the real thing. I scanned the branches and leaves of the ponderosa pines and madrones encircling my little porch. Despite mantids being masters of disguise, I assumed I could find one if I were actively looking. Apparently, I am no better than the ignorant flies and other prey duped by the mantids’ forest-camo-suit.

Then, one day, there she was, sitting on the porch handrail. She wasn’t the owner of the original molt. This was a European mantis, Mantis religiosa—slender abdomen, bright green color, and distinct forearm markings. The triangular head swiveled and remained cocked in my direction, as if saying, “here I am.”

I knew she ate insects, but I admit to being nervous. This was a predator. A voracious predator of Jack-the-Ripper’s reputation in the insect world. An ambush hunter with velocity—no one ever saw her coming. Her front arms were formidable switchblades ready for action. She couldn’t have done anything to me, but some sort of primitive fear kept me at a respectful distance.

Over that searing July, I found more molts. I found both species of mantids, but only when they ventured onto the porch, likely using my lights as a hunting ground. Apparently, this was peak molting time in the Sierras, meaning I cannot take credit for suddenly being good at spotting them—I was just playing into the increased odds. But I never found one in the molting process. Why were they so good at hiding their transitions? Or why was I bad at seeing them?

My molting process didn’t go smoothly. It stayed with me, causing confusion. Two weeks after Rhys’ stillbirth, I took my two-year-old son, Balen, to the Oakland Zoo. It was a morning when I felt like my molt was still attached to me. Charlotte—mother of an energetic two-year-old—wanted desperately to give her living son a normal day, to see him smile, and to hear him beg for a better view of the river otters. But Charlotte—recent-loss-mom and shell-of-a-human—hated the sun and hated interacting with other people, especially those who didn’t know the hollowness inside her.

On the drive to the zoo, my two selves battled for control.

You should not be here. You should not be going to a zoo like a normal person. You shouldn’t even be breathing. Like him.

This is what you have to do. This is what a mom does. Balen needs this.

Oh no. Oh no…

Breathe. You can do this. You have to do this. This is what your son needs today.

Mismolts happen. A mismolt is an incomplete molt, occurring when the outer layer is not completely shed from the body. This results in twisted, mangled legs or even death if the mantid cannot escape its exoskeleton. From juvenile to adult, a mantid will molt six to nine times. For these Northern California mantids, all molts happen in less than a year.

If a mismolt happens and an appendage is damaged, it sometimes can be fixed in the following molt, if the mantid survives until then. It’s a risky way to grow, but a lot of animals on Earth grow this way—crabs, lobsters, spiders, insects—shedding outer skeletons periodically to grow a little bigger.

This internal battle between my ‘functioning-self’ and ‘shell-of-a-self’ left me with a constant sense of guilt. When I thought about my dead son, I felt absent for my living son. When I experienced a floating moment of humor with Balen, I felt I didn’t deserve it.

My molt would catch me off guard. The Oakland Zoo had a 20-minute chair-lift ride above some enclosures. Balen was excited because we hadn’t been able to ride for many months—you are not allowed when pregnant. I asked for two tickets at the booth, but, scowling, the attendant said that I couldn’t ride when pregnant. I was aware that I did not look good, only a few weeks post-partum, but I thought I could race through this misunderstanding before the other me, the mismolt, could get involved.

“I know. I’m not pregnant.” I said, reaching for the tickets. Unsatisfied with that answer, he leaned out of the tiny ticket window, tapping his finger on the rules sign.

“It says here that you cannot ride when pregnant.”

I could feel the mismolt rising up.

That man is right. You shouldn’t be here.

You have to be here.

This is wrong. You shouldn’t be looking at lions. Or camels. Or anything.

Balen needs this. This isn’t about you.

Exactly. This isn’t about you. You don’t deserve to do anything. To be anywhere.

Then a voice I didn’t recognize said, “I was pregnant, but I’m not anymore.” And then we were on the chair, my heart beating in my head. Rising into the air, I held Balen’s squirming body back from the edge as he tried to get a better view of the lions sleeping in the grass below.

Mantids should not be handled after they molt, their new exoskeleton soft and vulnerable. I desperately wanted to see a mantid in the wild, upside down, perhaps under a palm-sized leaf, waiting for the last of her wispy, translucent exoskeleton to release the final fibers from her new, shiny skin. I imagined she would be hungry, dreaming of air-slicing a dragonfly, but feeling that hum inside that told her to be still a bit longer. Stay still while the delicate, new tissue hardened. Stay still until the last of the molt was gone. Stay still, because that was the only way to grow. The only way to keep living.

I walked grocery store aisles resembling a Walking-Dead character searching for Balen’s favorite foods like “blue-blues” (blueberries). I threw rocks into a stream near our house, and while Balen thought his mom was fun, I channeled anguish into each muddy explosion. Like the names of infamous hurricanes, certain things from this time period are ruined forever—the smell of lavender and movies like Milo and Otis and Cars. I did not choose to listen to Life is a Highway on repeat for months, but that was the only way to secretly release my tears in the front seat before pulling myself together to meet Balen’s friends at the park. Balen had a favorite car-puzzle app on my phone that I handed to him often when I couldn’t talk in those early months. I feel like I am at the bottom of a well when I hear the motors of the cars in that app now. I know this is all Pavlovian—a conditioned response to a trigger—but all those things were mangled in my messy process of molting.

I never found a mantid in mid-molt that summer. They are better at hiding than I am at seeking. Better at waiting patiently for the storm to pass, before emerging fresh and reborn. Unlike a wise mantid, I could not stay still, but perhaps that was the only way for me to make it. The only way to grow. The only way to keep living.

As the fall temperatures dropped, I wondered whether the mantid could sense her end. Did she know, as she carefully glued her papery, ribbed egg case on a branch, that it would be her final act? Could she feel it inside, like a hum of a slowing motor? Did she think about catching a final meal, a juicy bee or a rare beetle? Did she remember back to all the molts of her short life? Probably not. She probably just followed her primordial code to survive and reproduce, not plaguing herself with unnecessary, self-analysis.

She did what she had to do. And so did I. And I made it through the winter.

Charlotte Stevenson is a science writer with a broad portfolio from technical to personal. She has written for institutions and organizations such as NOAA, University of Southern California Sea Grant, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and California Ocean Science Trust, and published pieces in UNDARK, The Chestnut Review, The Denver Museum of Natural History’s Institute for Science & Policy, and was shortlisted in the 2023 Prism International Creative Nonfiction Contest. Charlotte is in the Johns Hopkins Advanced Academic Masters Program in Science Writing and has an M.S. and B.S. in Biology from Stanford University, spending many years at Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey, California. She currently lives outside of Sacramento, California.

Sources:

1. BugGuide. (n.d.) “Species Stagmomantis californica—California Mantis.” Iowa State University: Department of Plant Pathology, Entomology, and Microbiology. https://bugguide.net/node/view/7985
2. iNaturalist. (n.d.). “Mantids of California.” Accessed 8 September 2022. https://www.inaturalist.org/check_lists/65587-Mantids-of-California
3. Lee, Robin. “Praying Mantis Molting: Everything You Should Know.” The Pet Enthusiast,  Accessed 27, Sept 2022. https://thepetenthusiast.com/praying-mantis-molting/
4. USMantis. “Praying Mantis Anatomy.” Accessed 27, September 2022. https://usmantis.com/pages/praying-mantis-insect-diagrams-and-nomenclature
5. Will, K., Gross, J., Rubinoff, D., Powell, J.A. Field Guide to California Insects, 2nd Ed. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020, pp 83-86.