What’s going on here?

February 5, 2016 • 12:45 pm

by Matthew Cobb

This intriguing picture, taken by Sean McCann (@Ibycter) (who we’ve featured here) was posted by Sean during his curation of the @Biotweeps account on Tw*tter, in which a different scientist tw**ts from the account (there are many such accounts, including @realscientists, which give an insight into a range of scientific areas).

Anyway, here’s the challenge to WEIT readers. What is going on in this photo? Put your description in the comments.

 

20 thoughts on “What’s going on here?”

  1. Woa! It took me a second. I know the family of the cryptic species (I drew in on a T-shirt once). But I aint’ saying anything just yet.

  3. I was still trying to work out if there were 3 or 4 species of arthropod in the picture when I followed the link to the tweet and got the answer.
    I’m still trying to figure out if it’s 3 or 4 species.

  5. A neuropteran, well camouflaged as a lichen, is sinking its quite large mandibles into what looks to be a cockroach (though I can’t exclude a beetle with a funny head), while ants scurry round.

    1. ok… i think you’re cheating a bit here. cause, perhaps… you know stuff.

      i feel micro-aggressed.

    2. ‘can’t exclude a beetle’ – I suppose not, as the dorsum isn’t reflective enough to show a diagonal wing overlap vs median boundary of elytra. Are there roach-mimicking beetles?

  6. i think this beetle was sun-tanning, in his/her/xi’s happy beetle place, and was attacked by ants in a perfectly radial symmetry around the carapace. the beetle then briefly enlarged, went bioluminescent, then slightly radioactive, and left a kirilian imprint of it’s aura and trace bits of acid on the rock.

    a good tactic, and now the slightly shaken beetle and the more completely freaked out ants are having a confab about the ants micro-aggressions and the beetles personal space. i think it’s going to work out.

    ah, nature…

  7. Looks as though the ants are toting off bits of the cockroach, as well. The neuropteran was so beautifully camouflaged that I didn’t see it as anything other than lichen until it was pointed out. Nor can I see the mandibles. Other than three life forms gathering together for lunch, I don’t know enough about these particular life forms to know what they are really doing.

  8. Anthropomorphizing out the wazoo here but it looks like an ant lion is using a dead cockroach as bait to gather its lunch in one place.

  9. So I do not know what happened first, but the ants (Crematogaster ants but the look of them) are trying to make off with a cockroach. The camo insect is an owlfly larva, which is like an antlion larva only these are, well, like that. And they hang out in trees which means nowhere is safe.

  10. Mark and Greg came closest to the full story.

    According to Sean, the camouflaged owlfly larva caught a nocturnal cockroach (only a couple of cm long), and then the ants joined in and decided to cart off the roach (which is why they are all around it, all pulling in slightly different directions).

    The photo captures the 3-genus tug of war, with the poor old roach in the middle.

    I don’t know what the outcome was, but I bet it was miserable for the roach. – MC

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