“ANTLIONS are a species of insect that have fascinated me since I was a young boy.
“As a child, I used to keep them as pets in an ice-cream tub filled with sand. I love to watch them digging around, making patterns in the sand. Once they had their pitfall traps made, I would go out to hunt ants and small bugs for them to eat. As I threw the ant into the trap, I watched this set of huge jaws come out of the sand to grab the helpless victim and pull it down into the sand until it was totally buried, like something out of a horror movie. I thought these little bugs were so cool,” said Warren Dick.
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“Then, one day, my antlions became inactive, afraid that they had died, I searched very carefully through the sand. I could not find my antlions in the sand, but I did find strange looking round balls of what appeared to be silk and sand spun around something. Little did I know that I had just discovered the next step to the antlions life cycle. I kept these strange looking balls to see what came out because, at the time, I was convinced that they were egg sacks.”
Many people are unaware that antlions also go through a process of total metamorphosis. From insects that live in the sand, they spin into a cocoon and after a few weeks or months they emerge as adult antlions.
The adults look a lot like dragonflies, however, they are mostly active at night. Like most other insects, there are several hundred different species of antlions, ranging from a 2cm to 15cm wing span.
They are usually brown or grey in colour, although large black and yellow ones have been spotted at the Kenneth Stainbank Nature Reserve. As larva (babies) and adults, they feed on other insects. Antlions are totally harmless to humans.
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Contact Warren to have some of your interesting spiders, snakes or other wildlife identified. Call or WhatsApp him on 072 211 0353. Follow the conversation on Facebook, Warren’s Small World.
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