Attack Behaviour and Distance Perception in the Australian Bulldog Ant Myrmecia Nigriceps

The behaviour of the Australian bulldog ant Myrmecia nigriceps (Fr. Smith) has been studied by using moving targets characterized by sizedistance equivalence in relation to a stationary zero-point. The attack behaviour of freely moving animals demonstrated that the ants can discriminate between different targets, in the range of 5–80 cm, using movement parallax to extract information about the targets. By studying the antenna response it was possible to demonstrate that the stationary bulldog ant can utilize binocular disparity information and that this mechanism has an effective range of about 90 mm.