Oct 02, 2011: It's an antlion, famous for its peculiar way of hunting. It digs out a small pit in dry sand, digs himself at the bottom and waits while an ant or another tasty small creature gets on the slope of the pit and slides down on loose sand into predatory jaws. If the tasty thing tries to escape from the pit, the hunter helps it to fall down by throwing sand at it. Adult antlion looks like a damselfly with antennas. Here is a video of the trap and hunting.

The lines on the sand are antlion's trails left “while looking for a good location to build its trap (I wonder what are the criteria?).

The “lion” is small (~5 mm) and very active: always moving with his hinder part to front. Due to this, making a good shot without killing it is a complicated task. After a hard photo-chase on a paper handkerchief Andrei wanted to make some shots of the creature in its native environment — on sand. But when getting to native environment, the antlion dissolved in it instantaneously. I'm still trying to imagine the process of lively moving through a mass of stones (every grain of sand looks like a stone compared to the size of the antlion), pushing them by one's buttocks. I think, it's fantastic.

Photo by Andrei Katrovskiy

most likely, myrmeleon formicarius, as it`s the most widely spread species of this family in our region (afau), family Antlions, or doodlebugs Myrmeleontidae