# My new unusual pet



## Domanating (Jul 1, 2014)

For those unfamiliar with it, it's an antlion. Probably the easiest pet to keep. Learned everything I needed to know about them in 10-20minutes.

I didn't know they existed in Europe and I got very surprised when I found it. I stumbled across this one while removing weeds from my garden.

Unlike its easier to spot American counterparts, which dig funnel like holes in the sand, the European species don't. They just borrow 1cm under the sand with their jaws sticking out.

They are the larval stage of a delicate flyer that has the body of a dragonfly and the head of a mantis. While the larva is an ugly, venomous and voracious creature, the adult eats polen and nectar. Talking about contrasts!


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## D_Hemptress (Jul 1, 2014)

ive seen these on monster bug wars, very cool...


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## MantidBro (Jul 1, 2014)

ive seen them on bug wars too, theyre freaking awesome, how intelligent, and amazing, what a neat pet!


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## Aryia (Jul 1, 2014)

That is.. so scary!


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## Domanating (Jul 1, 2014)

I sure was excited when I found it. I really wasn't expecting to find these on this side of the world.

They just need a small place with sand or any similar kind of loose substrate, at least 1 inch deep (for american species that build pits, at least 3 inches are required) and you got youself an antilion enclosure. No water is needed. They get all they need from prey and they can survive without food for several weeks.

Ultimate pet for lazy people if you ask me. They are easier to keep than a plant, lol

Edit: Better yet, as long as you keep track of their food getting caught, you don't need to close the enclosure because they are incapable of climbing anything


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## MantidBro (Jul 2, 2014)

Domanating said:


> I sure was excited when I found it. I really wasn't expecting to find these on this side of the world.
> 
> They just need a small place with sand or any similar kind of loose substrate, at least 1 inch deep (for american species that build pits, at least 3 inches are required) and you got youself an antilion enclosure. No water is needed. They get all they need from prey and they can survive without food for several weeks.
> 
> ...


you FOUND it??? awesome!


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## Domanating (Jul 2, 2014)

MantidBro said:


> you FOUND it??? awesome!


Well, uuhh.... Yeah. If I didn't, I couldn't have taken the photos above. I already mentioned in the 1st post that I found it


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## MantidBro (Jul 2, 2014)

Domanating said:


> Well, uuhh.... Yeah. If I didn't, I couldn't have taken the photos above. I already mentioned in the 1st post that I found it


so fresh lol, i meant i thought you bought it, not actually found it, thats awesome


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## Domanating (Jul 3, 2014)

MantidBro said:


> so fresh lol, i meant i thought you bought it, not actually found it, thats awesome


Oh. No, I don't buy anything insect related. I already have enough conventional pets to care about and pay for their food and health. Every insect I own and prey items I give them are wild caught. I also don't have cricket or fruitfly cultures because I simply don't need them.

In Europe, exotic pet business is a fraction of what the US can offer, so in most cases, it's every exotic keeper for himself h34r:


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## MantidBro (Jul 3, 2014)

Domanating said:


> Oh. No, I don't buy anything insect related. I already have enough conventional pets to care about and pay for their food and health. Every insect I own and prey items I give them are wild caught. I also don't have cricket or fruitfly cultures because I simply don't need them.
> 
> In Europe, exotic pet business is a fraction of what the US can offer, so in most cases, it's every exotic keeper for himself h34r:


wow, theyre all wild caught, awesome, which pets do you have?

lol


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## Domanating (Jul 3, 2014)

MantidBro said:


> wow, theyre all wild caught, awesome, which pets do you have?
> 
> lol


Apart from exotic pets? 1 dog, 4 cats right now, which can vary a lot, due to one of my females being a kitten factory. 2 carp fish and 2 chickens.

Edit: Maybe you could count the wild frog that decided to live in the small carp pond too


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## MantidBro (Jul 4, 2014)

Domanating said:


> Apart from exotic pets? 1 dog, 4 cats right now, which can vary a lot, due to one of my females being a kitten factory. 2 carp fish and 2 chickens.
> 
> Edit: Maybe you could count the wild frog that decided to live in the small carp pond too


haha nice, i want a pet frog some day

ive got 3 cats, a bearded dragon (who unfortunately is on his way out... hes 8 years old and suffering from metabolic bone disease...), 10 mantids not counting budwing nymphs which im selling. tarantula. then ive got a huge tank full of stuff i caught outside. around 30 salamanders, stink bugs, assassin bugs, beetles of all sorts, some crickets, got an awesome camosola beetle, some snails, slugs. isopods. you know, just about everything in there, lol.


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## Domanating (Jul 4, 2014)

MantidBro said:


> haha nice, i want a pet frog some day
> 
> ive got 3 cats, a bearded dragon (who unfortunately is on his way out... hes 8 years old and suffering from metabolic bone disease...), 10 mantids not counting budwing nymphs which im selling. tarantula. then ive got a huge tank full of stuff i caught outside. around 30 salamanders, stink bugs, assassin bugs, beetles of all sorts, some crickets, got an awesome camosola beetle, some snails, slugs. isopods. you know, just about everything in there, lol.


That's a lot of animals you have there! Sorry for the dragon. I also have great interest in reptiles. Last year I kept a snake for a couple days. I found it severely wounded due to my cats. It didn't live long, though.

Currently I have 7 mantids, 6 of them offspring of last years mantids, the antlion, an ant farm and an aquarium filled with literally hundreds of common indian stick insects also offspring of last year's walking sticks.

Keeping Indian stick insects is madness. Females don't need to mate, infact I never seen a male in my life. They literally poop eggs like crazy. They can lay 100 or more eggs during their adult life, those 100 eggs will hatch into perfect copies of their mother that will lay another 100+ eggs each and so on!


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## MantidBro (Jul 5, 2014)

Domanating said:


> That's a lot of animals you have there! Sorry for the dragon. I also have great interest in reptiles. Last year I kept a snake for a couple days. I found it severely wounded due to my cats. It didn't live long, though.
> 
> Currently I have 7 mantids, 6 of them offspring of last years mantids, the antlion, an ant farm and an aquarium filled with literally hundreds of common indian stick insects also offspring of last year's walking sticks.
> 
> Keeping Indian stick insects is madness. Females don't need to mate, infact I never seen a male in my life. They literally poop eggs like crazy. They can lay 100 or more eggs during their adult life, those 100 eggs will hatch into perfect copies of their mother that will lay another 100+ eggs each and so on!


for sure! i love animals theyre my life! thanks for the sympathy. its sad to watch an animal that ive had for that long slowly start getting worse and worse. im a big fan of reptiles as well. id kept a female garter snake for a year. i released her this year! found her when she was about 6", she was exactly a foot long when i let her go.

the budwing nymphs i have are also from my females. one died recently, and the other just turned 10 months old which is the average lifespan of this species.

oh wow you have that many walking sticks? awesome! i only ever kept one. my moms friends collected it for me, thinking it was a mantid, lol. funny. it was an adult female manomera blatchleyi. she laid quite a few eggs herself! i took them out of her container and put them in a condiment cup... and one day i dropped it, crushed it, the eggs went everywhere, they were impossible to find! i tried for a while too. theyre just so small, and roll-y. that was quite annoying. and of course all hope was truly lost once i had to vacuum. how long do they take to hatch?


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## Domanating (Jul 5, 2014)

MantidBro said:


> for sure! i love animals theyre my life! thanks for the sympathy. its sad to watch an animal that ive had for that long slowly start getting worse and worse. im a big fan of reptiles as well. id kept a female garter snake for a year. i released her this year! found her when she was about 6", she was exactly a foot long when i let her go.
> 
> the budwing nymphs i have are also from my females. one died recently, and the other just turned 10 months old which is the average lifespan of this species.
> 
> oh wow you have that many walking sticks? awesome! i only ever kept one. my moms friends collected it for me, thinking it was a mantid, lol. funny. it was an adult female manomera blatchleyi. she laid quite a few eggs herself! i took them out of her container and put them in a condiment cup... and one day i dropped it, crushed it, the eggs went everywhere, they were impossible to find! i tried for a while too. theyre just so small, and roll-y. that was quite annoying. and of course all hope was truly lost once i had to vacuum. how long do they take to hatch?


Nice! I heard a lot of people in the US usually keeps or kept garter snakes for being so common. I never had a decent chance to keep a snake, though.

The one I barely saved from my cats was a ladder snake. Native only to the Iberian Peninsula.

As a non-buyer, I can't keep mantids all year round. Mine only live 6 months on average but I managed to get a female going for 9. Because I live in a temperate region I cannot choose when to hatch my eggs. Every year I have a gap in mantid keeping from January to June.

Oh, yeah, there was a year where I failed to find any mantids whatsoever so I went looking for a replacement, which was a paper wasp nest, lol. Kinda dangerous I know but it was fun. I kept them for about 5 or 6 months and I wasn't stung once. In fact I was mindblown by their intelligence. In only 2 weeks they learned that I was no threat so I was able to stick my hand inside an enclosure with 7/8 wasps, inches from their nest. Some may say 'that's insane' but I say 'that's experience'  

If you lived a bit closer to me I would drown you in stick insects for free  

I'm not sure about your species though but mine are mostly nocturnal so it's a bit boring to keep them, which is a shame.

As for the eggs it depends. If you live in a region that has cold Winters, you can expect them to hatch in the first days of warmth. Otherwise, they hatch in about 4 months.


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## aNisip (Jul 8, 2014)

Nice find! The EU sp, like you said, is a lot harder to find than its Western counterpart. Mainly because of that funnel. Literally have thousands of them in my yard...looks like some sort of minefield with all the little pitfalls. Certainly a death-zone for most species. I have seen them take down an unfortunate newborn Brown anole attracted to the bottom of the pit because of a stuggling ant, to even Monarch caterpillars that are just inching along the ground. They provided hours of entertainment growing up, tossing in the unlucky, but invasive, fire ant.


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## Retpallylol (Jul 10, 2014)

I kept these when I was a kid. Very fun and amusing to watch them thrash sand at their victim. Do you know how long they stay in this larval stage? I released mine after a couple of weeks and never found out.


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## Domanating (Jul 10, 2014)

Retpallylol said:


> I kept these when I was a kid. Very fun and amusing to watch them thrash sand at their victim. Do you know how long they stay in this larval stage? I released mine after a couple of weeks and never found out.


According to some research I did, due to the irregular chance of getting a meal, they remain in larval stage from 1 year up to 3 years.


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## Domanating (Jul 11, 2014)

Surprise surprise! Yesterday I took a stroll on sandy area close to a beach and I found 2 more antilions while following their characteristic doodles on the sand. I've seen these weird long drawings in the sand before but I would never guessed they were made by antilions. One similar size to the first but way darker and the second about half the size of the others.

Even more surprising their behavior is different. The smaller one builds pits! The darker one, unlike my first antilion, prefers to drag their meal below the sand.

I'm building up footages so I can show you later but it will take a while


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## dmina (Aug 4, 2014)

Cool insect... what a life?

Waiting for your footage...

Thanks for sharing


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## Domanating (Aug 4, 2014)

dmina said:


> what a life?


I'm having a hard time understanding if that's a true question, a rhetorical question or something else, lol

I still dont have enough and/or decent footage for a video. I wasn't expecting my latest catches to pupate so early either, so I went out find some more. I'll probably get the video done next week.


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## dmina (Aug 5, 2014)

LOL... not a question really.. just meaning... that it can survive on pretty much nothing for up to 3 years.. not much going on in it's world..

But really cool creature.


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## Domanating (Aug 12, 2014)

Here it is. A video showing their hunting skills and their fast acting venom.

Don't blink too much or you'll miss some of the action.

The video will be working in about 5 to 10 minutes


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## dmina (Aug 12, 2014)

OMG... Thant was awesome! The video camera was so good ... it didn't miss a thing...

That antlion was wicked!


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## Domanating (Sep 12, 2014)

dmina said:


> OMG... Thant was awesome! The video camera was so good ... it didn't miss a thing...
> 
> That antlion was wicked!


Cheers! Actually it was a digital photographic camera that took the footage. Even I was impressed when I got it.  

Sooo, my last antlion has been doing pretty much nothing since I posted this video until this week. He refused food, kept wandering around in the enclosure and I figured he was going to pupate and I know it will take a while. So I left him be. Now a month has passed and to my surprise he didn't pupate but molted!

He's now bigger and meaner than ever. Keep in mind he didn't eat or drink for an entire month and he's alive and kicking.


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## dmina (Sep 13, 2014)

Wow... he is a lot bigger.. How many times do they molt? wow... thanks for keeping us updated!

Now go feed that monster!


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## Domanating (Sep 13, 2014)

According to some research I made, they only molt twice in their larval stage, which is surprising. Their entire life cycle is weird, actually.

For now I fed him a common housefly but I'll get him some bigger prey soon.


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## Crazy4mantis (Sep 13, 2014)

It's like a land shark mantis!

I can never seem to find an ant lion, always wanted to see it hunt in person.


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## Forcep (Sep 14, 2014)

I've kept those with my friend before, the larva are quite easy but neither of us managed to get the adult emerging.


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## Domanating (Sep 15, 2014)

Forcep said:


> I've kept those with my friend before, the larva are quite easy but neither of us managed to get the adult emerging.


The adults are not interesting to keep. I put the cocoons in an open jar with sand and twigs next to an open window. 2 Antlions already pupated, emerged and left. I never seen them emerging but they left their old skins and a hole in the cocoons.


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## PrayingMantisPets (Sep 19, 2014)

Domanating said:


> Surprise surprise! Yesterday I took a stroll on sandy area close to a beach and I found 2 more antilions while following their characteristic doodles on the sand. I've seen these weird long drawings in the sand before but I would never guessed they were made by antilions. One similar size to the first but way darker and the second about half the size of the others.
> 
> Even more surprising their behavior is different. The smaller one builds pits! The darker one, unlike my first antilion, prefers to drag their meal below the sand.
> 
> I'm building up footages so I can show you later but it will take a while


Those are everywhere in my back yard!


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## dmina (Sep 20, 2014)

Guess it matter where you live...


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## kunturman (Sep 21, 2014)

That Portuguese antlion is much larger than the ones I have seen here in Florida, how long are they?

Great video, and quite a diverse diet of hoppers.

Thank you for sharing.


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## Domanating (Sep 22, 2014)

amamantodea said:


> That Portuguese antlion is much larger than the ones I have seen here in Florida, how long are they?
> 
> Great video, and quite a diverse diet of hoppers.
> 
> Thank you for sharing.


As far as I know I might have caught 2 different species of antlion.

The first antlion was almost 2cm (0.8 inches) long when it pupated.

The 2nd antlion, which had the unexpected molt I posted above, was also 2cm long pre-molt, but now it's about 3cm (1.2 inches) long. I assume this one's a female.

These 2 antlions hunted and behaved the same way. They don't build pits.

The 3rd antlion was easily 2 times smaller than the others before pupating (1cm/ 0.4 inches long). This one built pits.


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## Domanating (Jun 18, 2015)

Hey, I have some interesting news.

My latest posted ant lion has survived the Winter starvation without issues and pupated a few weeks ago.

What's interesting is the fact that it failed to make the cocoon so it pupated out in the open, which allowed me a glance to the middle stages of pupation.

For those that don't know, Antlion when cocooned do 2 things: first they metamorphose to something that resembles the adult and 2nd they molt right after making an opening in the cocoon with their new set of jaws.

Here's what he it looks like after metamorphosis






Not sure how it will behave without a cocoon to open when he's ready to molt, though.


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## dmina (Jun 21, 2015)

eeewwwww... LOL


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## minard734 (Jun 22, 2015)

I need to go outside and dig them up... Now I want to breed these too! Love antlions! Grew up watching them.


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## CosbyArt (Jun 23, 2015)

Nice, thanks for sharing your unusual pet. Makes me want to go check the sandy areas around nearby creeks for some.  

Too bad about the molt problem, let us know how it turns out.


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## Domanating (Jul 31, 2015)

Well, it turns out not having a cocoon is a death sentence. The antlion died yesterday. There were obvious stretch marks in its abdomen indicating struggle to molt. I guess without the cocoon to hold on it wasn't able to free itself out of the old skin.

Off to find more antilions I guess.


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## Salmonsaladsandwich (Jul 31, 2015)

Wow I just read how big it was... 1.2 inches! That's a huge antlion!

One time I had an adult emerge but it crawled into another's pit and got eaten.


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## Domanating (Jul 31, 2015)

Salmonsaladsandwich said:


> Wow I just read how big it was... 1.2 inches! That's a huge antlion!
> 
> One time I had an adult emerge but it crawled into another's pit and got eaten.


That's comical occurrence, lol

From my current understanding, pit building antlions are half the size of non-pit ones. I only found 1 pit builder here and I thought it would molt to become as big as the others but it cocooned in a very tiny sand ball and emerged without issues as an adult.


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