Antlion metaphors have turned up in several academic fields unrelated to entomology:
Chemistry
Teresa Head-Gordon, a physical chemist at the Berkeley National Laboratory, uses mathematic algorithms to calculate molecular structures. One of her creations is an algorithm she calls "antlion." From a given amino acid sequence, the antlion algorithm can predict highly accurate structures for small proteins like melittin (bee venom). For more information, see "Chemist uses mathematics to do the near-impossible," by Lynn Yarris.
Computer science
Corrado Böhm and Benedetto Intrigila wrote "The ant-lion paradigm for strong normalization." The paper was published in Information and Computation, vol. 114(1):30-49, October 1994.
Environmental statistics
R. Hanschu, P. H. Crowley and M. C. Linton, of the University of Kentucky, wrote "Antlion Foraging: Looking For The Optimal Trajectory Across Time And Space." The paper was presented to the 27th Symposium on the Interface: Computing Science and Statistics, 1995.
Mathematics and physics
Jean-Bernard Roux's on-line paper "La physique du tas de sable" ["The physics of a pile of sand"] uses antlion sand pits as a model to describe the way sand behaves in avalanches. Web site in French.
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