Ant-lion

• If the prey tries to escape up the wall of the pit, the larva flicks grains of sand at it with its head to set off small landslides and bring it down.
• The larva has no functional anus: it stores all its waste through the years its development lasts and does not void it until it becomes an adult.
• Its jaws are hollow: it injects digestive enzymes and sucks out the liquefied tissues of the prey, then flings the empty husk out of the pit.
• Its larva builds a trap: a conical funnel in fine sand, dug in an inward spiral, with its walls at the substrate's exact angle of repose, so that any ant stepping on the rim triggers a slide and slips down to the bottom.
• And if the prey tries to escape, the larva flicks sand grains at it with its head to trigger further slides.
• Buried at the apex, only its jaws show: hollow and pincer-shaped, with which it injects enzymes and sucks up the prey's liquefied contents.
• The larva has no functional anus. Its gut is closed and accumulates all its waste throughout the larval stage, which can last two or three years; it expels it all at once on emerging as an adult.
• The adult is completely different: it looks like a fragile, clumsily flying dragonfly, lives only a few weeks and is rarely seen.
• The shape of the funnel depends on hunger: the worst-fed larvae build the largest traps.
• The technique has been known since antiquity and is already described in the Physiologus, a bestiary of the 2nd century.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat & environment

Dry sandy ground sheltered from the rain: eaves, caves and pine woods

Sources consulted: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrmeleon_formicarius