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When Margaret Neville was walking through her yard, she found a creature that was so amazing, she just had to photograph it.

One of the best things about having a yard is being able to see nature in all its beauty.

Depending on where you live, you can see hummingbirds buzzing, foxes frolicking or unusual insects crawling.

Margaret Neville is lucky, because her yard in South Africa is teeming with wildlife. (It helps that it’s also a retreat and environmental center.)

Every time she strolls through her land, she finds something new. But one day, she saw a bug that looked so unlike anything she’d ever seen before that she just had to interact with it.

The creature was just sitting on a lavender bush.

It looked like something out of sci-fi. In fact, if someone had told Neville that the creature was an alien, she’d almost have believed it.

The creature had a hypnotic swirl on its back, green and white markings and, most amazingly, what looked like flower petals all over the underside of its body.

It doesn’t take a biologist to work out that the creature’s appearance was for camouflage.

The bug didn’t appear to have any stingers, so Neville picked it up gently. Neville also took photos of the creature before placing it back to where it had come from.

Neville shared the bug with her friends online. Eventually, someone came to Neville with an explanation of just what the bug was.

It turns out that the creature is a flower mantis, a praying mantis that lives in floral plants.

Every day for the next month, Neville went back out into her yard and found the flower mantis on the lavender bush. She named the creature Miss Frilly Pants.

And one day, Neville found out that Miss Frilly Pants may in fact be Mrs. Frilly Pants.

There was a male flower mantis with her. The only downside to this was the fact that pretty soon, she might be Ms. Frilly Pants, as praying mantises tend to cannibalize males after mating.

The act of cannibalizing your partner after mating with them is pretty normal for a female praying mantis.

In fact, 28% of male praying mantises that are in species that practice sexual cannibalism end up being eaten by a female after mating. It sounds like an insane practice to humans, but believe it or not, female praying mantises have very sound reasons for eating their partners.

In fact, a study has shown that “males that were eaten by their mates passed on nearly 89% of their tagged amino acids, while those who survived their romantic encounter passed on just over 25%.” And everyone knows that to grow up big and strong, babies need all the nutrition they can get. Sadly, for the male mantises, that nutrition is them.

On a less morbid note, different species of flower mantises live across Asia and Africa.

That means that there’s no chance anyone will find one in their yard in America, unfortunately. Although many people do keep flower mantises as pets. And it’s easy to see why. Just look at them!

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Source: Waterfall Retreat & Environmental Centre, Wikiwand, The Guardian, The Dodo