As soon as a bug steps into their fungus trap, ants will begin grabbing its limbs and pulling them in opposite directions as they sting it to death (which, oh yeah, is a thing ants can do). Small bugs are snatched away in seconds -- the bigger ones can stay up there for hours, slowly being torn into more manageable chunks. Eventually these contraptions look like miniature versions of a medieval torture tower.

Via BBC News
Awesome, it's whack-an-eldrich-horror-from-beyond time!

Knowing how dedicated these little bastards are, we fully expect human-sized versions of these things to start cropping up in our backyards overnight. Just know that we're on to you, you little shits.

And then, when another insect approaches, this happens:

If ever there was a time for the sound effects guy from America's Funniest Home Videos, this is it.

They erupt from the sand like a jack-in-the-box from hell and snatch up the prey at the speed of light, dragging far bigger insects than themselves below the ground to be devoured. These things are so hardcore that they can stay down there for weeks without eating and are able to survive floods.

Oh, and just in case a bigger prey tries to drag them both away once its been locked in the beetle's jaws, the young tiger beetle also has hooks on the sides of its abdomen that anchor it to the walls of its little death hole. It's basically a living, meat-eating manhole cover that eventually grows up into the Flash, if the Flash had bones on the outside and chewed people's heads off.

Via Beetlesinthebush
Sorry, but if we had to see it, so do you.

Oh, but that's just the beginning. The spider herself is only a stepping stone in the mantidfly's twisted life cycle; its true goal is to get its slimy claws on some succulent spider eggs, and it's willing to wait as long as it needs to to get to them (here's one that ended up waiting 44 million years). Some mantidflies even attach themselves to male spiders, wait for them to have sex, jump into the female like some sort of sentient STD and only then get to the eggs.

And then, when the spider is wrapping her offspring in a thick cocoon of silk to keep them safe, the parasite will sneakily get in there and allow itself to be wrapped with them. Once inside, the mantidfly larva mutates into a different form that feeds by sucking the unborn arachnids from their protective shells. The spider, meanwhile, has no idea that she's taking care of a baby-eating atrocity and is in for a huge surprise.

Via Discover Magazine
"Hi, Mom. Come give me a hug."

When it's eaten its fill, the mantidfly undergoes one final transformation into a scythe-armed terror of the skies and emerges from the cocoon. And in case you were feeling bad for the spider, the next one should help you get over that ...

Scientists had noticed for some time that these venomless spiders wrapped their prey in ridiculous amounts of silk -- up to 28,000 wrapping motions and 450 feet of the stuff to encase just a single insect. It almost seemed like they were trying a little too hard to compensate for their lameness and lack of poison. In reality, uloborids don't need poison or fangs: Their knitting abilities are deadly enough as it is.

You see, when biologist William Eberhard decided to perform tiny insect autopsies on uloborid victims, he found broken legs and caved-in faces. Though the spider weighed just 14 milligrams, its prey had been compacted into small balls by several hundred milligrams of pressure -- compare the size of this insect leg with the body of the same insect after an uloborid was done with it:

Via Scienceblogs.com
If the leg looks bruised, it's because the uloborid beat the corpse with it, just for fun.

It'd be like stuffing you into a suitcase. Silk did that. Hundreds of layers of silk, each adding a little more pressure to the suffocating bondage death cocoon. Eberhard mentions that some prey are "even killed outright" by the process, which can take over an hour. Some. Some are "even" killed. The rest presumably live long enough to regret ever saying "Haha, check out that fangless idiot -- I'm gonna go stand in its web for a while, and poop."

Via Squidoo.com
"Ha! Hey, guys, he's just looking at me like he's gonna MMRRRMPHH mrrmmffmfmm!"

After crushing its victim, the uloborid soaks the whole cocoon in powerful corrosive slobber, melting down the entire insect into a protein shake from hell. Sure, it might take a uloborid a little while longer to get to the part where it actually eats its prey, but it's all worth it for the satisfaction of being the most sadistic spider ever.

Everyone knows that frogs eat insects, not the other way around: They just sit there all day catching bugs with their adorable slingshot tongues, if cartoons are to be believed. Well, it turns out that those cartoons have been hiding a horrifying truth from you, probably because they want you to be able to sleep at night.

Via Gil Wizen
We're not so considerate.

Yep, there's a type of cunning insect that feeds on nothing but amphibians many, many times its size. Beetle grubs of the genus Epomis are the first known example of what scientists are calling "obligatory role reversal," meaning that they have evolved to eat absolutely nothing else but the animals that used to eat them -- and since those animals happen to be toads and frogs, that also makes the Epomis larvae the first discovered insects that live exclusively on the flesh of vertebrates. Like you.

Via Gil Wizen
Today the frogs, tomorrow your face.

Biologist Gil Wizen spent more than five years studying how these insects have adapted to fight back after thousands of years of froggy oppression. First the Epomis will lure a hungry frog by wiggling its antennae like crazy, because it knows that amphibians hunt based on movement. When the frog is close enough to lash out its tongue, the bug dodges it and rams its spiky head into the frog's underbelly, making it impossible for the frog to dislodge it even as the bug turns it into dinner.

Out of the hundreds of encounters between these beetles and various amphibians witnessed by Wizen and his colleagues, every single one ended in the insect's favor -- even in cases where the frog initially had the upper hand. In one case, a beetle grub was swallowed whole by its opponent and still managed to turn the situation around. Two hours later, it emerged from the frog's mouth, attacked it and killed it:

These things have evolved to exploit the physical and psychological flaws of its former predators: The beetles move just fast enough to dodge them and know exactly how to lure them. So think twice before you step on a beetle, or we could all eventually regret it.