#119 - Meat Ants
Iridomyrmex purpureus - The dominant species of Australia's ant fauna. Indeed, in sheer biomass, they outweigh every other species of animal on the continent.
Small comedies in this shot - two ants squabbling about the best place to put a bit of gravel, and one ant trying to stuff a very large pair of insect legs down the hole. It was like watching a dog with a big stick trying to get through a doorway.
Meat Ants live in underground nests of over 64,000 ants, and frequently in supercolonies that stretches up to 650 meters. Nest holes are regularly arranged, and each leads to a separate series of branched tunnels, which typically do not connect with the tunnels from other holes. Meat ants do not have dedicated soldier and worker castes like some ants. Instead, they exhibit age caste polyethism, meaning they take on different roles in the colony at different ages. Young ants care for eggs and larvae in the nest. Older ants form part of large foraging parties to exploit significant stationary food resources, such as a dead animal or a colony of hemipterous insects. Older ants undertake lone foraging across open ground, predominately collecting invertebrates and "building material". The oldest workers engage in ritual combat along borders between colonies to establish foraging boundaries.
Meat ants are highly aggressive towards other species of ants (and any humans that spend too much time near their nests, which is where I get involved), so are a dominant component of Australian ant communities. Other species employ strategies to exploit resources or habitats not favoured by meat ants, or forage at alternate times (like the common crepuscular Camponotus species).