All about the insect called the mantis
Move your mouse. On a phone, touch the screen. The mantis turns its head to follow. The black dot in each eye isn't a real pupil. It's a false pupil that seems to follow you depending on where you look from.
The gentle side-to-side sway is real mantis behavior too. It's thought to make the mantis look like a leaf moving in the wind.
Body secrets
Tap a pink dot to read about that body part.
From the field guide
Mantises from our own neighborhoods and unusual ones from far away. Tap a card for the full entry.
Tenodera sinensis
The largest mantis in Korea. It looks a lot like the narrow-winged mantis; you tell them apart by the color between the front legs and the color of the hindwings.
Read more →Amantis nawai
Korea's smallest mantis, under 1.5 cm long. Its wings are very short, and it lives under fallen leaves on the southern islands.
Read more →Hymenopus coronatus
A mantis that mimics a flower with its white and pink body and petal-like legs. In an experiment it attracted more bees than real flowers did.
Read more →Phyllocrania paradoxa
A mantis that looks like a crumpled dead leaf. With the leaf-shaped crest on its head and its wide pronotum, it's hard to tell from leaf litter when it keeps still.
Read more →Life cycle
Rough timing for Korea's large mantises. It varies with the weather and the species.
After mating, the female lays her eggs along with a foamy substance. The foam hardens into a tough egg case (ootheca).
They spend the winter as eggs. The egg case protects them from cold and drying out. In traditional medicine, egg cases found on mulberry trees are called sangpyocho (桑螵蛸).
When it warms up, dozens to hundreds of young, depending on the species, emerge from one egg case all at once. They look like tiny mantises right from the start.
They grow by molting, with no pupal stage (incomplete metamorphosis). Depending on the species they molt about 5 to 10 times. Instead of wings they have only wing buds.
The last molt brings wings. This is when they are biggest and hunt the most.
After mating, the female lays her egg cases, and when the cold comes the adults die. Next spring it all starts again from the egg case.
Myths and facts
Mantis stories
High-speed camera studies of the front-leg strike, how often males really get eaten during mating, and records of mantises catching birds and fish.
Read → Story 2Tiny colored filter glasses stuck on with beeswax, fake bugs on a screen, and a kind of 3D vision that works differently from ours.
Read → Story 3A single ear in the middle of the chest, not discovered until 1986, and males that spiral down when they hear bat ultrasound.
Read →Mantis fact of the day