It’s fun to wear costumes on Halloween and go door to door collecting free candy. Sometimes when you dress up, even people you know don’t recognize you.

A researcher has discovered an ant species in Brazil that is also good at tricking and treating. The mirror turtle ant tries to look like the turtle ant to sneak in and steal its food – a trick for a treat.

The turtle ant is known to be very aggressive, attacking any other species of ant that tries to invade. But the mirror turtle ant has figured out how to look kind of like the turtle ant. They also avoid bumping into the turtle ants so they aren’t recognized by their scent.

Turns out the mirror turtle ant is the first-known ant species to use such sneaky copy cat techniques to steal from another ant species. This is known as parasitism. A parasite lives off a host.

By mimicking the turtle ant, the mirror turtle ant has figured out a way to have another ant species find and collect food for it. That’s pretty amazing considering that ants are so small.