Tiger Beetle Hunting an Ant
1 Video View·Apr 16, 2015
A little part of the tiger beetle world is revealed in this video. The original video footage was shot by Pristurus and published on Wikimedia Commons. This is a Green tiger beetle (Cicindela campestris) that was filmed in a forest clearing at the Wollenberg, Hesse, Germany. There was no sound track on the video, we added the ambient sounds and narration. It is part of a tiger beetle story at Ask A Biologist (http://askabiologist.asu.edu/explore/tiger-beetles).
This is a life-and-death struggle, but to us it is happening so fast you hardly have time to figure out what's going on.
There's the big green beetle and its prey, the black ant.
If the beetle can catch the ant, it will tear it apart.
After a short chase, the ant stops running.
It looks like the tiger beetle has caught its prey,
but instead it has lost track of the ant.
That's because tiger beetle eyes and their tiny brain need movement to locate and chase down their prey.
With no movement, the ant has disappeared from the tiger beetle's radar.
Even a tiger can lose its prey if it's not moving,
but it has its nose to smell and sharp hearing to listen for their prey.
Tiger beetles have additional organs, too.
Their long, thin feelers, called antennae, can help avoid obstacles as well as feel a prey that is not moving.
Tiger beetles also have huge ears hidden under their hard wing coverings.
These ears are really good at hearing high notes and sounds through grass and even underground.
There are more than 2,700 species of tiger beetles in the world, and most of them live on ground.
Many of them have stripes and spots on their backs, kind of like a tiger.
These blotches make it harder for the prey to see the predator sneaking up on it,
but for both the tiger and the tiger beetles, they also make it harder for their enemies to see them.
If you look carefully, you can see the legs are metallic-colored purple with white hairs.
The rest of the body and head is green outlined with purple.
The white hairs are to protect the beetle from heat coming up from the ground, especially at noon when it is hot.
This species of tiger beetle has green and white spots.
Can you guess what kind of habitat it lives in?
What color would you guess tiger beetles are that live on brown sand, on white rock, on black soil?
Many, if not most, tiger beetles are the color of the ground they live on.