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Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296
Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296 |
Has anybody ever heard of these?
A lady on a nature walk yesterday showed us where ant lion larvae hide--in sandy inverted cones about the size of an inverted anthill.
You can take a little bitty piece of twig--or a pine needle!--and stick it down into the cone and the little ant lion will bite the end of it if you can find it.
These larvae feed off of ants that crawl--unsuspectingly--down into what the ant thought was an ill-constructed anthill. [Yes, my imagination is taking some liberty here.]
That little ant lion is really a little angry lion temperamentally: it quickly chomps on that ant and eats it up.
I'm going a-googling to see what these little creatures look like once they're fully developed.
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Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296
Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296 |
Here's a URL about ant-lions. It's claimed there that ant-lions are European, but not according to the biology teacher who showed us an ant-lion inverted sandhill. You can clearly see these hills in the pictures on the URL: http://www.kendall-bioresearch.co.uk/neurop.htm#antlionEdit: Additional information from a rather informal website--on it I read that ant-lions are referred to as "doodle bugs" in America. How American that does sound! Anyway, here's a quote from the site: "Antlions are weak flyers as adults but are best known for the trap/pits the larvae, known as Doodlebugs in n. America dig and live in. The pits are dug in loose sand and as there name suggests there main food items are often ants. The larvae will interfere with any ant that looks like it might be getting out of the pit by flicking grains of sand at it to make it loose (sic) its footing and thus fall into the waiting larvae's jaws. There are about 2,000 species of antlions in the world." http://www.earthlife.net/insects/neurop.html
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Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296
Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296 |
Ha, wwh! We crossed! You listed one of the URLs that I had--but the photographs there show just about everything you'd have to know to go out hunting antlions--not that you should remove them from their habitat, but it is fun watching one of 'em try to chomp off the end of a pine needle.
They're related to:
Owl flies.
Not that I know a daburn thing about owl flies.
And antlions full grown (you can see from the picture) look a little like dragonflies, but antlions are supposed to be not very skillful fliers according to what I read today.
They show their ferocity in their inverted hills which are referred to as pits--but I don't think pit is a good name for them--it doesn't seem to show the inverted cone nature of the way the hill looks.
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
Dear WW: the Ant lion larva that I used to think was some kind of spider has to find
sand similar to what would be used in an hour glass. I don't know how it makes the
conical pit, but it is out of sight in the bottom, until an ant makes the mistake of
taking a shortcut across pit. The ant lion senses the disturbance of the grains of
sand, and digs out slope below the ant, until ant falls down low enough the ant lion
can grab it and pull it out of sight to eat it. All you see is the surface of the sand
being mysteriously made for fall down the slope. I never had patience to stick around
to watch ant lion rebuild the steepness of the slope, which is critical, otherwise ant
could escape.
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