Ant mimicking spiders and the ants that are tricked by them

[beehammer]

There are spiders that like to pretend they're ants for the purpose of not getting their faces eaten off, right?  Right.  A lot of them, like the lady Myrmarachne plataleoides up there, run around holding their front legs like antennae to make the illusion extra realistic.

There are also spiders that run around looking like ants specifically for the purpose of eating ants' faces off*.  The idea behind that one is that they can sort of sneak around ants' nests and work columns and just pick up their dinner and make off with it.  The thing is that a) some of them (most Zodariids, for example) don't look a whole lot like ants and b) ants generally aren't going off looks anyway.

Like, this is why we bust out the borax and shit when we find ants in our house, right?  Ants lay down and follow chemical trails.  Chemicals are how they communicate.  Ants don't really care how another bug looks.  So there's this sort of assumption that "inaccurate" (translation: crap at their jobs) ant mimics must have some sort of chemical thing going on that lets them skate.  There are certain poisonous animals or lure-using animals that sequester useful chemicals from their prey, and one of the original hypotheses involved inaccurate mimics sequestering chemicals from ant prey to give off the right smell for an individual colony.  So far, they haven't found anything conclusive, but hope springs eternal.

Of course, a lot of Zodariids operate by sneaking in, killing an ant, and then slipping back out, no extraneous ant-contact required.  If they get busted, they slap the ants' antennae with their forelegs like they're trying to communicate, shove the dead ant in their faces, and basically play it off like they're hauling the corpse to the ant graveyard.  And if you're sitting there thinking "Pfft, that's not going to work, ants are smarter than that," well.  You're probably right about ants being smarter than that, but the thing is this is basically like some freaky-looking dude carrying a dead human running into you, shouting Sim-speak, and wandering off in the vague direction of a cemetery.  How likely are you to get in that guy's grill?  Honestly, here.  I'm guessing there are a lot of ant conversations that basically go like "What the fuck was that, Sheila?" "I don't know, Jill, but there's not enough sugar on the planet to make me look into it."

*There are even spiders that don't really pick one or the other.  Hell, there's a spider out there that looks like an ant to scare away other ant-mimicking spiders from their communal nests so that they can eat their young.  Spiders: shady as hell.