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Except that this bug, with its nearly two-inch wingspan, was way too big to be an antlion.

In their scenario — based on the marginal value theorem, often used in ecology to model foraging behavior — the bird visits a patch of antlion pits and pecks the larvae out, but sometimes drops them.

The team placed single trap-jaw ants into plastic cups filled with 4 cm of sand and a 1-cm-long burrowing insect with large jaws—known as an antlion—at the bottom.

To test this idea, the two biologists and their colleague Alan Worley simulated a hypothetical antlion community menaced by a bird.

If the downtime of a given antlion larva was predictable, predators “could perhaps learn some patterns,” Dr. Sendova-Franks said.