Mantis 

“The life of any organism depends on the possibility of its maintaining its own distinctness, a boundary within which it is contained, the terms of what we could call its self-possession. Mimicry, Caillois argues, is the loss of this possession, because the animal that merges with its setting becomes dispossessed, derealized, as though yielding to a temptation exercised on it by the vast outsideness of space itself, a temptation to fusion.” — Rosalind Krauss, Corpus Delicti 

In these portraits the viewer is invited by the mantis’ illusory gaze to anthropomorphize them. This gaze, along with their distinct head and shoulders, are akin enough to our own that an uncomfortable tension is created between the mantis and viewer. Superficially the tension is with their inhumanness — the way they feed, their distinct lack of consciousness, and their sexual cannibalism — but more subtly the tension is from their incidental, nascent mimicry of our form. As a species we mimic one another in society while struggling to remain an individual; homogeny is valued even at the threat of losing ways to distinct individuality. The mantis by being alien yet relatable erodes the viewer’s sense of self. This is an old conversation. Dracula and its strong definition of the vampire as man’s apex predator is a popular use for this concept though it has been eroded with more modern, and more human, treatments of the vampire. The concept is most frequently used as horrific, but conversation needs to move past this usage. As the number of acceptable others are eroded and ways differentiate ourselves become more limited we are threatened with losing ourselves to homogeny, and viewing the remaining other balefully. 

In these videos three mantises are in the process of dying. In the first a small black mantis freshly hatched is struggling to free itself from its skin. Having failed to do so before its new skin hardened the young mantis is crippled. Unable to feed itself doomed it is doomed to starve. In the next video an older mantis of the same species is dying of black death. Her mouth stained black from a vomited black viscous liquid she gently moves as death approaches. In the last video a mantis having suffered from partial cannibalization reaches his finally moments of life from loss of blood. 

The suffering we see in these figures is illusionary. They lack the basic neurological structures that have been identified with suffering. Similarly their behavior in studies have shown no real self awareness of sustained injuries.