Readers’ wildlife photos

Reader Tony Eales from Australia sent some lovely ant photos. His notes are indented:

Ants, eating and being eaten. I’m a big fan of ants, and am currently trying my hand at keeping and raising colonies from queens. It’s a fun and relatively cheap hobby that I can highly recommend for those who might be inclined. We are blessed in Australia with a huge diversity and abundance of ants, which, along with termites, largely replace the role of earthworms in ecosystem services in most Australian environments. They are also key pollinators, mutualists, predators, herbivores, prey, hosts and even parasites in many Australian ecosystems. Anyway, here’s a few happy snaps of them out in the world.

I think every school child in Australia knows the painful and leaden feeling of a Green-headed Ant (Rhytidoponera metallica) sting. They’re nearly ubiquitous in every lawn or field in this country. This is a taxonomically messy species complex and when you start photographing them you can see that there’s a lot of variation in the look of the workers, but all have some form of the characteristic purple-green iridescence. These ones are farming planthoppers from the Fulgoroidea superfamily.

One of the most common and diverse genera in Australia are members of the Iridomyrmex group. Most self-styled experts on Facebook seem to only recognise two species I. bickneli (bog standard Sidewalk Ant for Australia) and I. purpureus (the Meat Ant) but experts I talk to say that most ants IDed as I. bickneli aren’t, and half the ones IDed as I. purpureus aren’t, so I’m a little wary with my IDs. In any case here’s some Iridomyrmex sp. farming some sort of scale or mealy bug.

Another common ant I find are members of the Dolichoderus australis s.l. Here consuming some bird poop as they and other ants are often wont to do.

Ants more than bees are often the most common visitors to flowers. I’m not sure how much of a role they have in pollination but I’m betting it’s at least some. I have photos here of Golden-tailed Sugar Ants (Camponotus aeneopilosus), Iridomyrmex purpureus and a small brown Iridomyrmex sp. all feeding on a blossoming Soap Tree (Alphitonia excelsa) and Iridomyrmex cf. purpureus feeding on a grass tree (Xanthorrhoea sp.) blossom.

In the final three pictures, I went to a local dam one afternoon and everywhere I looked there were ant queens of some Camponotus sp. out on the ends of branches, leaves, tall grass, hundreds of them and they were providing a bonanza for many other creatures in the same area. The first picture has one caught by a Jewel Spider (Austracantha minax). If you look closely at the second picture it has some mites on it. I’m reminded of the poem by Augustus De Morgan, “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.”

The last picture shows predation of a queen by Muscleman Tree Ants (Podomyrma sp.). These ants live in the hollows of trees, never in the ground. I watched as several queens seemed to appear from somewhere above in the canopy, running down the tree trunk searching for a refuge under peeling bark. This one was interrupted by a tree ant and fled straight into the path of another and was soon surrounded and pinned. Such is life in the arthropod world.