After this assassin bug sucks the guts out of an ant, it doesn’t throw away the remains of its prey. Instead, the bug adds the carcass to a pile of dead bodies already on its back! Sometimes this species of assassin bug, Acanthaspis petax, ends up carrying more than 20 ant corpses at a time—like a gruesome backpack.
A. petax is found in East Africa and Malaysia. Only the nymphs, or juveniles, of this species wear the bodies of their prey. A. petax nymphs have fishhook-shaped hairs on their backs that ooze a sticky goo. This allows the bugs to attach dead ants to their bodies.
“The reason we think they do this is really cool,” says Christiane Weirauch, an entomologist who studies insects at the University of California, Riverside. Scientists believe that the stack of bodies acts as camouflage. It disguises the nymphs in two ways. First, it tricks predators like spiders and birds into thinking they’re looking at nothing more than a pile of dead ants. Second, the stack of bodies helps to conceal the assassin bug, allowing it to sneak up on its prey.
Other assassin bug species have equally creepy hunting behaviors. One, Tegea atropicta, jabs a termite with its proboscis, or straw-like mouthpart, and drinks its body fluids. Then the assassin bug “fishes” for more prey by dangling the termite’s dead body in front of an opening in the termite mound. Curious termites come to investigate the lure, and—BAM! The assassin bug snags them and “sucks them dry,” says Weirauch.