#Assassin Bug

[bedupolker]

Run your own race

[celestial-games]

A handful of nocturnal assassin bugs >:3

Featuring millepede assassin, bark assassin, black corsair and western corsair !

[textless]

Everybody loves milkweed vine, or milkweed-loving prey.

Cochise County, Arizona, September 2024.

[afrotumble]

This is not camouflage. It’s a trophy of the dead.

Meet the Assassin Bug nymph — nature’s youngest warlord. But this baby doesn’t hide. It wears the fallen.

After ambushing and draining ants alive, it stacks their empty exoskeletons on its back like armor. One by one. Shell by shell. Until it’s walking beneath a moving pile of corpses.

Why? Because ants are aggressive, and smell plays everything in the insect world. By wearing dead ants, it confuses predators and masks its scent — hiding in plain death.

It doesn’t run. It doesn’t beg. It builds its shield from what it slays.

It’s not hiding. It’s declaring war.

Written by Eyasin Ali

[wikipediapictures]

Apiomerus cazieri

[have-you-seen-this-animal]

Have you done one about the horrid king assassin bug? They're one of my favorite bugs :)

[crevicedwelling]

juice box: a Zelus luridus assassin bug drinks the life out of a little parasitoid wasp.

the first legs in Zelus and some other assassin bugs are covered in glue-tipped hairs, which help hold onto tiny, fast moving prey. other species—I think a Southeast Asian genus—collect sticky tree sap and apply it to their legs!

[sandpaperoctopi]

fairies!! species they're based on:

first row: Cylindrogaster sp. earwig, Saunders' webspinner, long-tailed silverfish, Galápagos carpenter bee (gynandromorph), Psilodera fasciata (small-headed fly), Elasmus sp. wasp, sawfly larva, Arilus carinatus (wheelbug), elephant hawkmoth

second row: European firebug and nymphs, milkweed assassin bug, garden tiger moth, rainbow scarab, Abachrysa eureka (lacewing), Brunettia ishiharai (moth fly), cowpea aphid, acorn weevil, Hunter's little paper wasp

[sarahmackattack]

Here we have a pale green assassin bug. Assassin bugs are as cool as they sound.

Take a look at the needle on the face of this little critter. They use that to pierce their prey (other insects), then inject stuff that dissolves their prey's innards then suck it out through that straw.

Metal.

[lazchance]

assassin bug eats ants and holds corpses on its back (Inara sp.)

while i wish i had taken better photos back then, heres an assassin bug that some of you might have heard of... it hides near ant colonies and hunts them off one by one... sucking out their juices (you can see this process happening to an unlucky ant in the first pic)

once its done feasting on its victim it places the corpse on its back, forming a large stack of all its victims corpses... apart from looking incredibly metal i believe this serves two purposes:

helps with visual camouflage from predators and curious photographers by looking like a clump of ants (they can stay still for pretty long

helps with pheromone camouflage from the ant colonies by smelling like ants... buffalo bill stuff

[textless]

[mushrooms-and-millipedes]

Nice bugs lately

[fly-sky-high-arts]

Another Damascus commission for @mysterious-luck, thank you!

[akadoodles]

Green Assassin Nymph

1708px by 2387px, Digital Oil Painting

The “Pale Green Assassin Bug” at work - I took a picture of him mid-meal before he scurried away with his snack, presumably a housefly!

[herpsandbirds]

my buddy found this funny little guy at his work today and saved him from a paint pan

we werent able to figure out what he was, we were hoping you may know?

found in Wyoming

Bug ID - WY, USA:

Hello, yesssss, this bugly little fellow is a Plains Bee Assassin (Apiomerus spissipes), family Reduviidae.

Species Apiomerus spissipes - Plains Bee Assassin - BugGuide.Net

[jupiterswasphouse]

[PHOTOS TAKEN: NOVEMBER 2ND, 2024 | Image IDs: Three photos of a brown thread-legged bug on a window frame /End IDs.]

One may think this is a typical stick bug, but, as it turns out, this is actually a thread-legged bug, a type of assassin bug!