Antlions

[Tenevanica]

I received three antlions through Ovogram! For those of you that don't know, antlions are the larvae of a flying insect in the family Myrmeleontidae, and they do rather well in captivity. They dig little pits in sandy substrate, and when a small insect falls in the pit, it is consumed! I'm 99% sure I won't have success breeding these, so I'll pin the adults when they emerge. These are cool little guys! I'll try to get some pictures once they build their pits.

*The larvae look like this: http://i.imgur.com/O5lhEfX.jpg

*And the adults look like this: http://urbanecologycenter.org/images/Adult_Antlion.jpg

*Not my pictures.

Oh, these are reportedly Myrmeleon sp. but I don't think that their care or behavior changes between species.

 

[Hisserdude]

Very nice, kept these while I was living in FL, such a cool pet! Shame the adults would be so hard to breed successfully.

Hope your larva do well for you!

 

[Ranitomeya]

Antlions make pretty interesting pets. I collected a couple dozen before when I went camping up in the Sierra Nevadas last year and they ate a lot and grew quite quickly before spinning spherical, sand-covered, silken cocoons. Unfortunately, every single one of them emerged as females and I didn't even have the chance to try to breed them.

 

[Ziad ElGuneid]

Cool, I used to collect these too.

 

[RebelWolf]

I used to keep antlions as pets. They're really cool

 

[Ratmosphere]

These guys look so rad.

 

[Smokehound714]

They're actually not hard to breed. You can use a tent in a dark room to achieve it. Adults will need to climb and hang from something after eclosing or else their wings will be malformed.

 

[Jacob Ma]

@Smokehound714 It's not that part. Most antlion adults live for only a few days, and some of the intervals in which they emerge can be very different. Yes, breeding them is about as easy as breeding moths and butterflies, but one can only hope they come out at the same time.

 

[Dennis Zhu]

Very cool insects.