You really met fake ants

I hope you read this article with doubts after reading this Weibo, but if you don't read it, it doesn't matter, after reading it, you will know: the vast majority of the following animals are insects and spiders that successfully mimic ants, with the first exception.

<h2>·1·</h2>

So starting with the first one, it's not an ant, it's a female antbee.

Ant bees and ants are closely related, both belong to the hymenoptera subsoacae family, then the wasps belong to the family Bee, and the ants belong to the family Ants. So it's not hard to understand that they have a common feature while looking similar: males have wings and females have no wings, which is more like ants.

But there are also many differences between bees and ants, first of all, they are much larger, such as the female Western hairy ant bee is nearly 2 centimeters long and covered with bright orange-red villi — that is a warning color, fast running, abdominal friction and strange smell are their defense measures, and if necessary, they will also reveal their "bee" nature: a sting of more than half a centimeter in length, enough to repel a cow, and can stab repeatedly, unlike bees that die after stinging.

Like many hymenoptera insects, they have a semi-parasitic habit, the female bee runs on the ground to feed, and eventually finds the nest built by the square-headed mud bee on the ground, lays eggs near the hive, and feeds on the larvae and honey of the mud bee.

<h2>·2·</h2>

This one is the easiest to identify, it's a tube spider [photo direct source].

Many spiders are mimetic into ants, this is first of all because their living space is highly overlapping, and secondly, more importantly, ants are the prey that most predators hate, because ants are not only difficult to eat, but also cluster attacks and crawls and bites, which is very difficult to deal with, spiders imitate ants can fox false tiger threat; at the same time, some spiders are not satisfied with ants, then mimetic into ants are also easy to mix with ant colonies, singing Trojan horses to eat a full, more killed two birds with one stone.

The specific motives of this species have not been found for a time, but spiders and ants have a huge anatomical gap, so the strong evolutionary force is obvious: the tube spider of the genus Myrmecium evolved a gourd-shaped cephalothorax, simulating the head and thorax of an ant; the base of the abdomen became very thin, simulating the thin waist of an ant; the legs became slender and pointed, especially the last few segments resembled ants.

But the flaws are also obvious: the spider has no tentacles, no compound eyes, and even if it can use its whiskers to impersonate the ant's jaw, the head is still bare and flawed, and earlier, the spider has two more legs than the ant - the injured one in the photo is missing, but more like it.

<h2>·3·</h2>

This one is a little harder, but it's easy to look closely, and it's still a tube spider. [Image source]

Compared with the previous tube spider, Pranburia Manhoppi cleverly solved the problem of "no antennae and no compound eyes, but two extra legs": they raised two front legs in front of them tightly together, and two large and dark-spotted joints aligned with exactly one ant head, and the more distant leg joints continued to be used to impersonate the ant's antennae, and the original cephalothorax was used as a whole as the ant's chest. This has been seamless in the small world of insects and spiders, but it is still easy to see with the greater resolution and higher perspective of humans.

<h2>·4·</h2>

This is an insect, with a lot less anatomical differences, but the flaws are still obvious— it's a nymph of a praying mantis. [Image source]

Newly hatched praying mantises are very weak, slow-moving, and often mimic as ants to protect themselves—as long as they are black enough, the anatomical features of the mantis are unabashed: filamentous antennae, particularly slender breasts, large compound eyes, triangular heads, and, most unconcealed, sickle-shaped catching feet.

This little guy found it near Guyana's Kaieteur Falls, the single waterfall with the largest flow of water in the world.

<h2>·5·</h2>

This one is both related and mimetic, and it needs to be placed very large to see the key flaw - it is a female cet wasp. [Image source]

The crayfish family is farther away from the ant family than the ant bee family just now, it is a relatively small family of green bees, and the females are often wingless and small, really similar to ants - but if you look closely, you will find that they have a pair of particularly strange front legs: not only muscular, but also seem to have more sections.

It turned out to be a pair of claws!

Crayfish are very common in arthropods, yet insects, the largest and most prosperous taxa of arthropods, rarely chelate, which is very strange, and we suspect that this is some kind of genetic linkage in the early stages of evolution, just as whether giraffes or pigs, real animals always have only 7 cervical vertebrae - but evolution always creates accidents, and the forelimbs of female cetaceans are dedicated to grasping its baby food, leafhoppers or waxhopper nymphs.

The female bee will grab the nymph as shown above, then bend over the abdomen to lay an egg in the crevice of the prey body, and the larva hatches and sucks the host's hemolymph from the surface of the body like a tumor until it grows.

In addition to the pre-enough, cets rely more on vision than ants, so their compound eyes are also much larger.

<h2>·6·</h2>

This one is more difficult, but with previous experience, we can still speculate on its true identity: Ant [image source]

Like praying mantises, mantises are involute insects, and their nymphs live in a similar environment to adults, but have no wings, which brings a lot of convenience to mimetic adult ants. The picture shows this genus of a famous mimetic ant, Macroxiphus, whose nymphs are not only black, but also have narrow breasts and thin waists, much like ants, but the flaws are still obvious: the iconic jumping feet of the orthoptera are dangling, and there are lips and whiskers on the mouthparts, and the pair of slender filamentous antennae are also very exposed.

<h2>·7·</h2>

This is the most successful of all mimetics, and many entomologists have to look a second glance to spot the flaws—it's a spider-edge bug. [Image Source]

Arachnid bugs are hemiptera belong to the general family of heteroptera suborder pteropods, which are close to the insects, and are also metamorphosed, and there are many species of nymphs in this family that resemble ants, and the tentacles and feet of the first few exposed fillings have been successfully copied - only the discriminating features of the oral organs cannot be changed: look closely, they have a needle under the head, that is, the hemiptera's signature stinging mouth organ, the aphids use it to suck the sieve fluid of plants, bed bugs use it to suck blood, and the bug hunters use it to suck the hemolymphatic lymph of insects. Spider-edge bugs use it to suck up the endosperm of the plant's young seeds, so it can sometimes cause losses to agriculture.

Of course, like several other involuting insects, once sexually mature, they no longer resemble ants and are easy to identify.

*The insects in the inscription are also nymphs of arachnid bugs.

Now you know how hard it is for entomologists to do field expeditions? Insects, which dominate more than 75% of the species of earth's living organisms, have a fierce competition for survival in the tiny world, doing everything to the extreme, except for local characteristics closely related to reproduction and feeding, which may vary greatly between related species and even in their own lifetime, but confuse between different taxa. If there are other terrestrial arthropods coming in to make trouble, it will be more important to see the old eyes.

Finally, I would like to remind everyone that there are only two dynamics of species evolution: random mutation and natural selection, which have nothing to do with how insects "think".