Praying mantis vs. Garden Spider

My favorite variety of spider is the garden spider. This is due, in part, to the large number of them we've found in our garden, because they have cool webs and we used to feed one that lived near our front door as a kid (we even incubated her egg sac). Nature tales has a great blog about spiders, including garden spiders. I also am fond of praying mantises as well. There were mantises everywhere at both Finley and EE Wilson. They're lovely in flight and when I stopped to talk to a green praying mantis at EE Wilson it stared at me and kept tilting its head, similar to Freyja's "what?" look.

Yesterday there was a show-down between these two insects. A large brown mantis had flown into a large garden spider's web. The garden spider had partially wrapped the praying mantis's head and front legs. Amazingly the mantis was putting up a fight, causing the spider to bite it and then walk away. As we watched I was filled with a mix of awe, at the spider's ability to catch and hold something as large as a praying mantis, and horror, at the mantis's obvious distress. Though I suppose another way to look at it is that the mantis put up a valiant fight, the spider was just too large.