This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products.

Great photos!

When I was in my teens, I watched an adult annual cicada emerge from its nymphal shell; the whole process took close to two hours and required an incredible effort on the cicada’s part. Once its wings had dried, the cicada took off and started flying slowly toward another tree. But it was intercepted in mid-air by a catbird that devoured it on the spot. All that work for nothing!

when i was a kid we brought what we thought was a really cool seed pod into the house. it sat on the mantle for a while. one day hundreds of baby mantises (manti?) emerged from the bulb. my mother was shocked but our geckos were loving it. baby mantis are cute, and evidently delicious.

Great pictures! What camera/lens is that? Macro I assume?

I love this… 37Signals is truly a forward looking business model.

Lesson learned…lets talk about prey mantis’s…

Word!

Awesome! Mantids are great, and actually make decent pets. Small, cheap to feed, short-lived, surprisingly personable, and beautiful. I’ve had 3 that I could feed by hand, although the biggest one started trying to take my fingertips off :)

So far my favorite is the number-9, lots of videos(by other people) on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EH7ldoKAIo&feature=related

ahh RSS – i thought you were bringing me to the new 37s launch announcement… project mantis!

To Dan:

So beautiful design in the natural world has no bearing on beautiful software design? I think that’s a short sighted perspective and one which will limit the quality of the work you do. One difference between a brilliant and an average developer is that the brilliant developer draws inspiration from many disciplines to improve the quality of his or her work, while the average developer only focuses on limited sources of knowledge that seem immediately applicable.

The 37 Signals developers have many interests and are wise enough to recognize that these non-programming interests can lead to surprising discoveries about the many connections between the various fields of knowledge.

@Dan: kthxbye

We have mantis’s (“manti”?) around our place, and watch them hatch every Spring. Nice pics.

Don’t they kill their other siblings, when they hatch?

I forgot to mention that the first photo looks slighly like something out of Aliens. The creatures in Alien(s) were essentially giant hymenopterids (members of the ant, wasp, and bee family), there seemed to be an aspect of the praying mantis to them as well. I’m quite sure, however, that they modeled the face of the queen Alien after Marilyn Quayle. Compare photos of them sometime, they are remarkably simillar.

What kind of camera did you shoot this with?

wow - these are amazing. i completely agree, jeremy, that if you can’t see the beauty and simplicity in/of everyday life, then it’s really hard to be inspired. the world is intricate and complicated, these photographs are the essence of simplicity (by no means, though, am i suggesting easy - for the mantis) and will be my source of inspiration for today. thanks for taking the time to post this!