Ahh, Mother Nature is a wonderful thing.

We have beautiful flora and fauna all around the world that never cease to amaze.

...and then they are nasty insects such as the Acanthaspis petax that you wish you'll never encounter because it will give you nightmares.

The Predator of the insect world

The Acanthaspis petax is a species of assassin bug that uses its victims' corpses as a body armour to scare and confuse other predators.

A member of the Reduviidae family, the Acanthaspis petax is typically found in East Africa and, yes, in Malaysia.

Just like other assassin bugs, the Acanthaspis petax hunts and kills its prey by injecting it with with digestive enzymes that melts its insides, before sucking out its innards like how you would a cup of boba tea.

Oh, but they're not done yet: after filling its tummy with insect guts, the Acanthaspis petax then uses its prey's exoskeleten as a suit of armour.

This is how it looks like fully-transformed:

Yeah, that is definitely nightmare fuel.

According to the Smithsonian Magazine, the Acanthaspis petax would fix the corpse of its prey on its back using adhesive threads it secretes from secretory hairs on its abdomen.

This creepy-crawly can reportedly stack up to 20 dead ants on its body at one time by binding them into a cluster that may be larger than its own body.

That sure reminds us of this guy:

Why the need for the armour?

Probably the same reason why Tony Stark needs his Iron Man suit: to protect himself from someone like Thanos.

Scientists call the behaviour 'masking' (when an animal or an insect applies materials from the environment to its body), but we prefer to call it by its more badass name: corspe camoulage.

True to its name, the Acanthaspis petax uses the armour to camouflage itself and to confuse its predators.

Despite hunting several different types of prey, scientists believe that the Acanthaspis petax almost exclusively use ants as its mask because salticid spiders -- the assassin bug's major predator -- would typically avoid a swarm of ants in fear of being swarmed by them.

If the predator decides to mess with the Acanthaspis petax any way, the assassin bug can release its body from the armour to run away and hide, leaving behind only a ball of dead ants.

Kinda like this:

Does it work?

Although one might think that the look of the Acanthaspis petax in its final form itself would scare away most predators, a group of researchers from New Zealand actually did perform an experiment to determine the effectiveness of the bug's masking.

The experiment, which was conducted in 2007, saw the researchers leaving the bugs in a glass case with several species of jumping spiders. Some the insects were masked, while some were left naked.

As jumping spiders rely on their acute sense of sight to hunt, the experiment would determine if the ball of dead ant carcasses served as a visual camouflage or not.

The researchers found that the Acanthaspis petax's armour of ant was more than just looks, as the spiders attacked the naked bugs roughly ten times more than those with an armour on.

That led to the researchers confirming that the large mound of dead bodies on the back of the Acanthaspis petax changes the visual form of the insect to the point that even their natural predators could not recognise it.

And because spiders are reluctant to attack a swarm of ants, the Acanthaspis petax can live to eat (and scare) for another day.

Oh, speaking of crazy insects, did you know Malaysia is also home to an ant species that explodes to save its colony?