I do not deny that the limited area of the cage may favour the massacre of the males; but the cause of such butchering must be sought elsewhere.

It is perhaps a reminiscence of the carboniferous period when the insect world gradually took shape through prodigious procreation.

The Orthoptera, of which the Mantes form a branch, are the first-born of the insect world.
Uncouth, incomplete in their transformation, they wandered amidst the arborescent foliage, already flourishing when none of the insects sprung of more complex forms of metamorphosis were as yet in existence: neither butterflies, beetles, flies, nor bees.

Manners were not gentle in those epochs, which were full of the lust to destroy in order to produce; and the Mantis, a feeble memory of those ancient ghosts, might well preserve the customs of an earlier age.

The utilisation of the males as food is a custom in the case of other members of the Mantis family.