Der Ameisenlöwe
In English, that's The Antlion. I chose German in honor of my friend Simone who was with me during an experimental time of my life. Experimenting with antlions, that is, not with Simone.
See, for years, I always wondered about those little pits of sand under lots of bungalows on the beach. I had a few different theories: rain water dripping through cracks, chickens pecking, some other bird. And then, finally, one day this March, it dawned on me: antlions! I remembered reading about them as a kid (I think in the Charlie Brown's Book of Questions and Answers) but I don't think I'd ever seen one before in real life. So I decided to do an experiment. I found a little termite, on a termite trail, picked it up, and dropped it in one of these pits beneath my hut. Lo! and behold, it was instantaneously snatched up (well, down) and devoured. Cool! When I told my friend Simone, she knew exactly what I was talking about, her grandmother had taught her about them. Simone and I did a few tests with them: digging them up, seeing how big an ant they could get (they could sometimes get a big red tree ant, but these ones were able to escape the pits most easily so we had to help the antlions), how often they could feed (didn't really wait around long enough to find out that answer). And I've been meaning to write about them for 4 months now, kept on forgetting to. If you google antlion, there's a lot of websites about them. In this one, you can even buy pet antlions!
- posted by dearsirsam @ 1:43 PM