Ruud Kleinpaste: Tossing some soil for the antlions

A moth or so ago I was walking around the Halswell Quarry, looking for native bees. We have about 28 species of these bees in New Zealand, and the unfortunate thing is that we know very little about these creatures. 

A new book by Rachel Weston described how these tiny bees make holes in the ground where their larvae (babies) are raised. The air space around those tunnels is quite busy, with bees coming and going constantly; some air traffic control could well be a useful asset to these tiny habitats!   

I didn’t just find a heap of native bees but also a few holes of significant size: conically shaped holes with a diameter of at least 30 millimetres, situated in a dry bit of soil, protected from regular rain fall.  

It reminded me of the holes I used to have under the eaves of our old open car port.  

In the pit of these holes live a very clever Neuropteran insects, known as Antlions. The cool thing is that this extraordinary species is the only “antlion” endemic to New Zealand – it’s ours and it lives nowhere else in the world.  

The fully-grown adult is a sizeable lacewing with beautiful wings, shaped by a multitude of fine veins. It’s not a strong flyer, but elegant when it climbs up the vegetation around the area where it grew up. This insect feeds on pollen and small insects, but it is not very long-lived.    

The larvae (young versions) of these antlions are the ones that create those magnificent holes in the soil through clever movement of their bodies. Excavation is a fine art.   

They are predators, meat eaters, and the holes are their traps. These predators are equipped with a mean set of jaws. 

When an insect ventures into the realm of these antlion babies, they will tumble down the steepish slope, down to the bottom in the centre. That’s where the antlion larva is waiting to grab its prey with impressive, sharp mouthparts that look like pincers.  

Their diet is any invertebrate that is small enough to be subdued: crawling caterpillars, small beetles, native bees, ants that made navigation errors, etc.   

The coolest part of the antlion’s arsenal is the tactic of making the potential prey lose their footing!  

As soon as an ant tumbles down the slope and dislodges some sand or bits of soil, the antlion baby starts tossing some soil, throwing sand uphill in the direction of the prey to make it lose its balance!  

And of course I can’t help fuelling the fight by dropping some soil particles into the antlion’s clever trap – now this is a fight to watch!  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Tame podcast
from News Talks at Bee.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Climb past the Men in the Garden. He's with us
this morning, how roade?

Speaker 3 (00:17):
Hello Jack? Just a message from Julie. Do you realize
we are the best babysitters in the world.

Speaker 4 (00:22):
Oh please, We're going to take all volunteers we can get.
We're you going to take all volunteers we can get.
You gotta be very careful making those kind of commitments
early on. I think I need to at the very
least get a bit of a steer on the sleeping
patterns and that kind of thing. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
I know I love babies though, it's absolutely true. But
there you are. Hey, great, great news.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Thank you, No, thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, I'll talk about it later.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:47):
Well, well we're talking about some other little babies this morning.
Some native bees that you've been noticing around your nick
of the woods.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
I've been looking for native bees here in the halls
will Quarry. But that's not I found a few. That's
not the point. But I must tell you that there
was something else that I did to find there, and
they were significantly little, conically shaped hole right with the
diameter of about thirty millimeters or something like that, situated
in dry bits of soil. And I looked at it

(01:13):
and I thought, I've seen that. Boy, I know what
this is. And the so started looking it up, and
there we are. I remember what it is. They are
what they call.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Ant lions and lions.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
Yeah, ant lines. Isn't it a lovely name? Ant lines.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
It's just like an ant like and then a lion
like the king of the jungle.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
That's right. Wow, So these are these are actually neuroptera
or if you like, you know, neuropteran group of insects
that basically have their young in pits that they make
their own pits, which are quite steep and deep, and
in the bottom in the base of the particular pit
lives the baby off that particular end lion and it

(01:55):
sits there basically doing nothing until an ant or something
else walks nearby or slips into the pit which is
a trap. And then and then what happens is amazing.
The moment the end lying feels the sand coming down
in the pit, it starts throwing sand back up at

(02:17):
this stupid end that fell into its pit as if
it tries to escape, and so it throws sends up
by making these ant lions. It's sort to make those
ants lose their balance and they fall down and it's
becoming prey.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
Wow. So basically, the ant falls in a hole, it
tries to climb out, and this thing just throws dirt
at it so that the keeps falling down.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
It's an amazing It is the wonderful and most wonderfulst way.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Well yeah, yeah, no it's not.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
But there's other things they eat so well, they eat caterpillars,
they eat as little beetles and so on. But that's amazing.
Now I put a photo on the website and you
can see what that end lying baby looks like with
two enormous jaws with serrations. And boy they are quick,
these guys fabulous.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
Yeah yeah, So.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
They do this during the day, but mostly at night.
But during the day is what I do, because if
I find a little hole like that, I throw little
bits of scand down into the bottom of the end
line's trap, and the end line comes out, looks at me,
it starts throwing sand at me. And I thought, it's
just a nice thing you can do with your new
child all day.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
That's amazing. Yeah, Okay, yeah, thank you so much that. Yeah,
there's beautiful. What. We're gonna make sure they put those
photos up on the on the website as well. Do
you know, I'm not sure that. I don't think I've
ever heard of an end line until today.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
No, but I think it's so wonderful for that creature,
because it's a clever little bum that actually throws sins. Yeah,
it's prey.

Speaker 4 (03:48):
I love it.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
Yeah, it's very good. Hey, thank you sir.

Speaker 4 (03:50):
All right, we'll make sure those photos are online, and
thank you very much for the generous offa. I don't
think you know what you've wrote yourself into just yet.
But that's not a problem. That's not my problem necessarily.
That's maybe rude and Julie's all of those photos of
beyond the New texb website, it's worth a look.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Actually they're really yeah, quite looking little insects.

Speaker 4 (04:07):
Newstalksb dot co, dot inded Forward slash Jack is the
place to go, of course, if you want anything from
our show.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to News Talks dB from nine am Saturday, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio.