Unidan, AKA Ben Eisenkop, is an ecosystem ecologist who first rose to fame (infamy?) on Reddit by popping up in posts across the site, answering any queries and concepts pertaining to biology and ecology. Eisenkop is a columnist for Upvoted, where he spotlights a new creature every week.

With all the rejuvenated Star Wars buzz following the release of The Force Awakens, I thought it would be fun to look at a bizarre beast that could have been the inspiration for one of its most famous alien monsters.

Badass bounty hunter Boba Fett meets his end (well, aside for the Extended Universe material) in the Sarlacc pit, a gigantic hole in the desert sand with a maw at the bottom ready to devour any hapless prey that falls in for a thousand years.

But did you know that there is a creature on Earth that also waits in the sand for prey? Without further ado, I present the antlion. Antlions are a family of insects (Myrmeleontidae) which comprise over two-thousand species. Neither ants, nor lions, they are named because they mainly prey on ants.

While antlions live their adult stage as a large flying insect, superficially resembling something akin to a dragonfly or damselfly (though they are of no relation and are in a different taxonomic order), they spend their larval stage mainly underground. Here they dig pits in the sand and lie at the bottom, motionless. When, say, an ant wanders over the lip of the pit, they are immediately assaulted with thrown sand from the antlion causing them to slip on the loose substrate and fall to the bottom of the pit, where the jaws of the antlion await.

The prey is then dragged under the sand where they are consumed by the larval antlion. Using straw-like jaw projections, the antlions suck the prey dry and then flick their prey’s desiccated corpses out of the pit. Lovely.

You can watch the process here in a video courtesy of National Geographic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWkfAyfBDHE