The other day, while walking down to the lake on a path that took me through some pine and juniper, I chanced upon about a dozen antlion traps in a patch of open earth below one of the pine trees. The traps are easy to spot. They are cones of fine sand and soils built into dry earth—often in places protected from rain.
The cones are made by the larvae of antlions. These are fearsome (and, with my apologies, unattractive) predators. They live at the bottom of cone-shaped traps they make, waiting for a hapless ant or other small insect to fall in.
As an adult the antlion becomes an insect remarkably similar to a dragonfly. Adult antlions live by consuming nectar and pollen.
Posted
below is a video of an antlion at work.
—Mitchell Hegman
Sources: Wikipedia, www.missoulabutterflyhouse.org
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