Question: I’m sorry to bug you again, but I can’t think of anyone else to ask. When I have been going out in the backyard, in the dirt there are dozens of tiny craters. They are perfect, about an inch deep, and inch wide, and perfectly circular. Something is making them in the night, what can it be?
Answer: The craters are like tiny pitfall traps and each contains a doodlebug at the bottom under the sand. They are supposedly called doodlebugs because of the way they doodle in the sand while they meander about. They are young antlions, a kind of predatory insect of the family Myrmeleontidae. If you know your ancient Greek, the translation is easy (myrme = ant, leon = lion). They sit in the bottom of the cone shaped hole waiting for unsuspecting ants to fall in and then they eat them. Interestingly, these insects make their cone shaped traps using the steepest angle the sand can maintain that shape so that the slightest disturbance will cause the prey and the sand to fall to the bottom where the antlion waits, jaws up, for supper. It can be cheap entertainment for kids if they like to manually put ants into the holes and watch the carnage. That’s what we did. Caution: playing with insects is habit forming and they might grow to be entomologists like me.
