It started with "Let's make a mantis website." When I asked about direction, the answer was "Everything about the praying mantis, the insect. Fun. Enjoyment." At first I put body structure, a field guide, the life cycle, how to keep one, myths and facts, and a game all on one page and posted it. After posting, I heard "There's still not much content. Is it only one page's worth?" so I rebuilt it as a 41-page site split into Field Guide, Observe, Keeping, Stories, and Playground.
How the 41 pages break down
The field guide accounts for most of the page count. The 8 Korean mantis species and 20 species from around the world each get their own page. The idea is that someone searching for a species name like "Chinese mantis" or "orchid mantis" lands straight on that species' page. Addresses use scientific names (for example, species-tenodera-sinensis.html). Romanizing Korean names makes the spelling wobble, and some species have no English name or several.
- Home: summary and menu, body secrets (tap the 10 pink dots for part descriptions), life cycle, myth-and-fact cards
- Field guide index 1 + species detail 28: search by name, scientific name, and region; filters for region, size, and appearance; a table for telling Korean mantises apart
- Observation guide 1 + printable observation journal 1: monthly calendar for 8 species, where to look by season, an egg case identification table, telling males from females, taking photos, things to respect
- Keeping 1: enclosures, care by stage, feeding table, molting, 11 frequently asked questions
- Stories index 1 + 6 articles: hunting, the 3D glasses experiment, the ear that evades bats, horsehair worms, fossils, mantis kung fu and the mantis that tried to stop a chariot
- Playground 1: a fly-hunting game, a quiz that draws 10 random questions from 34, and "Which mantis are you?"
The front-page mantis that turns its head toward the mouse, with a black dot in its eyes that follows along, stayed as it was, and I added the same effect to the illustrations on the field guide and story pages. The black dot is a pseudopupil. The facets pointing straight at you absorb light and look black, so when your viewing position changes, the dot moves with it. There are no image files. I drew one mantis in SVG and drew all 28 species with a palette that only changes the body, wing, and eye colors.
The content was researched separately first
As pages multiply, so do mistakes. So before writing, I researched four tracks separately: Korean mantises, mantises of the world, science and culture stories, and observation and keeping info. Each fact was collected with its source URL and a reliability rating (high, medium, low), and where sources gave different figures, I wrote them as a range. For Korean mantises, the baseline was a 2024 paper that re-examined 494 Korean specimens by morphology and DNA (Shim & Song, ZooKeys 1206). Every species page and story article lists the sources consulted at the bottom.
What I fixed while researching
The original one-page site and the first version of this article had errors. I fixed the ones the research confirmed.
- I'd mixed up two small species. The species you recognize by "black and white markings on the inner forelegs" is Statilia maculata. Amantis nawai, at 12–15 mm long with very short wings, is the smallest mantis in Korea and lives in leaf litter on the southern islands.
- Korea has 8 mantis species, not 9. One species on the old list was a green form of Statilia maculata mistakenly reported as a different species. The scientific name of the Chinese mantis is also Tenodera sinensis, not Tenodera aridifolia as on the old list.
- There are about 2,500 species worldwide. I'd written 2,400, but as of 2024, 2,514 species are recorded.
- I removed claims I couldn't find a source for. These include "turns its head up to 180°," "one of the few insects that can turn its head far," and the description of the dwarf mantis playing dead.
- "A strike faster than a blink" was only half right. The phase where the forelegs wrap around the prey takes about 9–35 milliseconds, but the whole attack including the approach takes anywhere from 60 to 290 milliseconds. So I changed it to the measured value "as fast as about 0.01 seconds."
- I added the actual rates to "females eat males during mating." In studies of wild mantises, it happened in 31% of matings for the narrow-winged mantis and under 10% for the Chinese mantis.
- I didn't repeat news wording about the giant Asian mantis. This introduced species has no legal designation, such as an ecosystem-disturbing species. I also dropped the news phrase "twice as big as native species" because there were no figures behind it, and wrote its size as "being checked."
On the world mantis and story side, too, results came out that differ from widely spread explanations. The orchid mantis doesn't live on orchids; it waits for bees on green leaves, looking like a flower. Sources disagree on "the world's largest mantis," so I didn't name a specific species. Wang Lang, the founder of mantis kung fu, is a legendary figure not confirmed by historical records. In the story of Duke Zhuang of Qi, the mantis that blocked his chariot was originally a symbol of courage. There's no settled explanation for why the insect and the skin wart share the same name in Korean, so that's what I wrote. These points are collected in a "Commonly misunderstood" box in each story article.
Pages are generated from data
Fix 41 pages by hand one at a time and the menus and links soon drift out of sync. So I gathered species info, story articles, and home page text into data files (tools/mantis/data), and had a generator (tools/mantis/build-pages.js) build the HTML with a shared menu, a current-location indicator, and a footer. The generator checks that links between pages point to real files, and stops if even one link is broken. Every internal link is written as an absolute path starting with /mantis/. That's because the ghmun.com build fixes links that are exactly a file name, like "species.html," but not links with something after them, like "species.html#id-table."
Fly-hunting game rules
The mantis at the bottom of the screen turns its head toward the mouse, and clicking makes it strike with its forelegs. Only insects inside the green fan shown in front of it (190-pixel radius, about 17 degrees to each side) get caught. A fly is 1 point, a golden fly that flies off after 4 seconds is 5 points, and catching a bee costs 3 points. Every 5 catches in a row adds 3 more points. After a strike you can't strike again for 0.35 seconds, so clicking wildly doesn't raise your score much. Over the 30 seconds, insects get faster and more numerous as time passes.
What I checked and what I couldn't
I opened all 41 pages in headless Chrome and confirmed there were no script errors. I also checked every page at phone width (500 pixels), and found the Keeping page overflowing to the right. The cause was a one-column grid stretching to the width of a table, so I fixed it so the grid cell can get narrower than the table. I also fixed long species names getting cut off in the observation calendar. I checked the field guide filters by clicking them with a script. All 28 species, 20 world species, 4 small species, and 1 species for a search on "왕" (the Korean prefix for "giant") all filtered correctly. The quiz, the personality test, the checklist, and the card flips worked without errors too.
There are things I couldn't verify. In headless Chrome, game time doesn't advance, so whether the 30-second timer counts down has to be checked separately in a real browser. Items with little data, like the size of the giant Asian mantis and names for world species that have no Korean name (marked on the page as "provisional translated name"), are left as things to fix when new information turns up.