“Doodlebug, doodlebug, where are you.” Some people will know what I am talking about when they read those words. They, like me, have sat on the ground with a straw trying to get a doodlebug to come out of its hole.

The house I grew up in was way off the ground on pillars of rock. The soft, dusty dirt under the house was always dry, a perfect combination for doodlebugs. There were many funnel shaped depressions scattered around in the soil from them. I spent many hours as a child wiggling a straw in the hole, trying to get the doodlebug in it to come out.

I do not ever remember seeing a doodlebug until I was grown. When teaching life science, I found out they were really ant lions, a small but ferocious looking bug that lived in the ground. Their holes were actually traps!

Ant lions are the larvae of an insect that looks like a dragon fly. They live in the ground, eating small insects they can trap, until they mature and change into the flying stage of their life cycle.

After learning about them while teaching, I looked around and found some at my house in Griffin. Their conical holes were just as I remembered. I found some ants nearby and got one on a stick. When I dropped it into the hole, it tried to climb out but kept slipping back. Suddenly grains of dirt were being flipped out of the bottom of the hole toward the struggling ant.

This dirt hitting the ant made it slip even more. It fell to the center of the hole and something under the dirt grabbed it! That looked like something out of my wildest nightmares, being grabbed from under the ground and slowly being pulled down.

The ant struggled, but it was in a firm grip. It quickly disappeared completely. The last thing I saw of it were its antennae waving as they slipped under the ground.

I got a piece of paper and managed to scoop up the hidden critter. It looked like a small beetle with huge jaws. This bug sits under the ground, waiting on an ant or other small insect to fall into its trap. When it feels the struggle of its prey, it starts flipping dirt at the ant to make it fall. When the ant hits the ground right over the hidden jaws, the doodlebug grabs its dinner!

There was an Outer Limits TV show while I was growing up that showed a similar theme. Explorers landed on another planet and members of the crew kept disappearing. They finally found out it was critters living below the sand, pulling them down for a meal. I wonder if the writer of that show got the idea from doodlebugs?

Nature is not always nice. Animals die. I often tried to imagine what the ant must feel like, being grabbed and pulled down from below. Then I realized ants do not have feelings or emotions. They do not think. It would be a terrible way for a person to die, but I do not think ants have the same fears as I do.

Rock worms are cousins of doodlebugs, but they live in the water. Their jaws have pinched many a fisherman on the Flint River when the worms were used as bait for bass and catfish. They live in the moss on rocks and catch small water bugs and minnows for their food. Doodlebugs look like small, short rock worms.

I am glad rockworms and doodlebugs don’t get any bigger. If they did, it might not be safe to walk on soft dirt or wade the river!

Check out your back yard for doodlebugs. They are a great example of the ways nature works. Observe other interactions in nature and realize we are part of it. Spring is a great time to be outside, looking at the wonderful world we live in!