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The lovely scientist, Elissa Suhr, otherwise known as Ant to me, is my old school mate, current housemate and best friend.
I was one of the victims she lassoed into helping out with her research - namely, hopping into the car, driving beyond the fringe of Melbourne, scouring the ground for those little brown insects...
And! Once we tracked some to its headquarters, we got the shovels, a big black tub, and two little tools that is basically a plastic jar with two plastic tubes going in and out, one to create suction with your mouth, the other to suck up the ants and deposit them into the jar.
But first, we'd hit the nest quickly with our shovels, and bring it up into the black tub, and get down on our knees to pick up more, and most importantly, track down the queen of the nest - otherwise, it will have been a waste. Time is cruical - as the queen immeidately goes low, trying to escape into the hard ground.
One time, we found a nest between tree roots and inside a rotten part of the tree itself - it was irrirating, trying to get to the nest between the roots and inside the tree. After the queen(s) were caught (we usually found more than one queen per nest), we'd drive back to the lab, and carry the black tubs in to be processed - that is, sucking up the ants and putting them into clear containers, for either behaviour study or genetics.
For behaviour study, Elissa would toss in two ants together and see whether they would fight or have a cuppa, mixing ants from nests all over melbourne.
A few months ago, she took a trip to Perth and South Australia to check out the colonies there - whether super colonies were established there, and whether they were connected to melbourne in anyway.
Hopefully, her research will help out with invasive species, since Australia's having a bit of trouble with them - particularly the cane toad, the bastards now popping up in NT and West Australia! |
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