Wild about Ants
Posted on 1 August, 2014 by Connecting Country
If you were in Newstead on the afternoon of Sunday 6th July 2014, you be excused for thinking that a revolution was underway. You’d struggle to believe that instead almost 200 people came along to the Community Centre learn about the invertebrate family Formicidae – or otherwise known as the humble ant.
Dr Alex Wild was indeed a wildly entertaining and engaging speaker, and he had an amazing selection of accompanying slides. His talk covered the three main reasons we should care about ants:
1. There’s so many of them
2. They interact with so many other plants and animals
3. They drive major environmental processes
Undoubtedly there’ll be a lot more people of all ages wandering across central Victoria with a new respect for these extraordinary creatures. Maybe one day we’ll even have a guide to the identification of local ant species! Connecting Country and the Norman Wettenhall Foundation were proud to be able to support the Newstead Landcare Group to run this event. Congratulations to Kate Sandiford from Newstead Landcare in particular for her efforts.
For people wishing to continue their study of ants further, Kate has identified the following books on the biology, behaviour and unusual social structure of ants and their colonies – all except the last book are available through the Goldfields Library Corp libraries:
- Adventures among ants: a global safari with a cast of trillions. by Mark Moffett
- Journey to the ants: a story of scientific exploration. by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson.
- The lives of ants. by Laurent Keller and Elisabeth Gordon
- Secret lives of ants. by Jae Choe, Jane Goodall and Dan Perlman
The CSIRO also has an amazing section of their website devoted to Australian ants, their biology and their identification (http://anic.ento.csiro.au/ants/ or also http://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Australian_ants).
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