What kind of camouflage does Acanthaspis petax use?

In 2007, a team of researchers from New Zealand carried out an experiment to test whether the insect's corpse-carrying strategy truly helped protect it from predation. In the study, they left assassin bugs alone in glass cages with several species of jumping spiders, which are their natural predators. Some of the insects were carrying balls of ant carcasses on their backs (the researchers called these "masked" bugs) while others were left naked. Since the jumping spiders have excellent vision but a poor sense of smell-they hunt by using their acute sense of sight to make a precisely gauged leap and land on their prey-the experiment would indicate if the ant bodies served as visual camouflage or not.

The result: the spiders attacked the naked bugs roughly ten times more often than the masked ones. The researchers even repeated the experiment with dead, preserved assassin bugs, to control for the effects of movement and behavior, and the results remained the same. Carrying that ball of dead ants, it turns out, is a great strategy for the assassin bug to use in trying to survive for its next meal.