PARK WATCH Article December 2024 |

Adrian Marshall, Facilitator, Grassy Plains Network, ponders if citizen science efforts to protect an uncommon ant may have led poachers to its profitable nest

Myrmecia nobilis doesn’t have a common name and it isn’t common. This native bull ant could be a grassland saviour, just like other threatened species that stand, flap, scurry or vegetatively mass in the way of bulldozers. And that’s exciting.

The little evidence we have suggests it is a rare grassland specialist, limited to the Melbourne region, but we don’t know because no one has really looked since the 1940s. Contemporary data is from a handful of citizen science records posted on iNaturalist.

You might think having only five known locations would be enough to get the ant listed as threatened under Victoria’s main nature laws. Sadly, you’d be wrong.

To find out more, a few of us from the Grassy Plains Network and VNPA teamed up with some Entomological Society people to learn about the ant.

It’s an unusual ant. They live in small colonies of only about 20 workers. And the queens are flightless, meaning the ant is unable to disperse widely over the landscape. That’s a concern, because it makes the ant more vulnerable to local extinction, especially in highly fragmented grasslands.

To meet the ant, we went looking for the recorded nests, and it’s not easy to find an ant in thick grassland.

That’s when things went wrong. One of the five known nest sites had been dug up!

We were horrified. Our nest had been poached.

It turns out ant collecting is surprisingly common, with queens of rare ants worth good money.

Part of our horror was that our citizen science activities had possibly contributed to the poaching by alerting people to the ant’s potentially rare status, encouraging people to look for it.

We were in a terrible quandary. Keep on with the citizen science despite fears we were making matters worse, keep working towards legislative protection of a potentially endangered species? Or stop, keep secret the remaining known nest locations, and hope the ant survives without human help?

One poacher, an ant collecting ‘enthusiast’ on YouTube, recently told us via chat that the reserve where the poaching happened has been a known collecting site for years.

Our recent interest, in this instance, hadn’t had anything to do with the poaching. We’d just uncovered it.

Inaction will gain the ant little. We need to move forward carefully and through good rigorous science build a strong basis for FFG listing.

Then our bull ant friend can really stand and bellow!