Heloise Gibb   My PhD examines interactions amongst ants on outcrops of Hawkesbury sandstone.

The Australian meat ant (Iridomyrmex purpureus) has a patchy distribution over this area, but where it is present it behaves as a 'dominant' ant - it is active, abundant and aggressive. The initial part of my study examined the effect of the presence of meat ants on other species of ant and I discovered that activity and responses to baits of ant assemblages on outcrops with meat ants were different from those without. However, these differences existed only for sandstone surfaces, and not in the patches of heath on the outcrop, and were due mainly to other species of Iridomyrmex.

My future work will involve an exclusion of meat ants from some of these areas to determine if the differences are due to the presence of meat ants and not another intrinsic factor. I am also interested in nest movement behaviour in the golden spiny ant (Polyrhachis ammon), a species common on Hawkesbury sandstone. The golden spiny ant forms colonies with multiple nests and is frequently observed carrying other ants between nests, but it is not clear why this ant moves between nests so often, or which ants are responsible for the carrying behaviour. I plan to investigate this behaviour through a series of field and laboratory studies.

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