JAWS!

Life in the Ozarks can't really compete with the Spielberg movie, or can it?

I guess the answer demands on how closely one is able to observe nature and how fully one uses one's imagination. And imagination was really what caused the horror in Jaws, anyway.

So here we go.

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The Giant Stag Beetle

My first ferocious insect is actually only frightful to see.

Lucanus elaphus, the Giant Stag Beetle, is a huge insect almost three inches long with pincers of about an inch. Fortunately those pincers are mostly for show. Only the male has such large ones, and he uses them only to impress the ladies and to wrestle with the guys. He hasn't actually got the strength to give much of a pinch with them.

The adult beetle lives for about a month, defending a rotten stump from other males and mating when possible. (The male in the two photos above is posing on one of my deck posts, which I hope he is not correct in believing to be rotten wood.) The female lays eggs in the stump and they hatch in due time into the larval form. For the next few years the larvae munch away, growing and molting toward their brief lives in the sun.

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The Ant Lion

Unlike the Giant Stag Beetle, the inconspicuous Ant Lion is a ferocious predator . . . but only in its larval stage. As an adult, it is a pretty little thing (much like a damselfly) and it feeds only on pollen and nectar (except for a few species that also eat small bugs).

The Ant Lion larva is tiny (less than 1/2 inch) and I've never actually seen one, though their sand traps are common and unmistakable. I have a whole colony of these sand traps just outside my garage door, so today I decided to use Sue's new TG-3 camera to take a close-up photo of the very bottom of such a trap, where the Ant Lion lies concealed and waiting for an unfortunate ant to slip over the edge.

If you look very closely and use a bit of imagination, you can just make out the front-half of the sand-covered beastie. It helps, however, to know what you should be seeing so here is a link to a photo from the of the larva:

Nothing helps the imagination more than a bit of video. National Geographic has a nice YouTube piece about the Ant Lion doing its job: Antlion Death Trap. Apparently, there is a price to pay for being so cruelly predatory: Ant Lions are the most constipated of insects, so much so that they have no anuses!

And that scares even me.