It's been raining a lot here in Tucson, so sometimes interesting critters take shelter in the house. I found this little mantis on the floor of our office before the cats did. I subjected it to a few pictures in a big pickle jar before transferring it outside to a bush for a final photo. When I was a kid I raised mantises in ten gallon tanks filled with grass. I caught grasshoppers and crickets and fed them to the mantises. I kept them alive all summer until they mated, the females ate the males, and laid egg sacs on the grass stems that hatched into enormous broods of ant-sized mantids too small for the mesh cover of the tank to contain. Those mantises grew to be much larger than this fellow. Maybe it has growing left to do.
