It's not clear if they deliberately drop on to you, or if they fall out of the tree, but once on you they're quite hard to shake off. They're far too small to sting or bite you effectively. I have no idea what they eat or how they get back to their nest or colony. In our garden they occur under our Jacaranda trees and Elderberry.
I first became aware of what they were when my cousin Denis Brothers collected specimens next to the dam near the old quarry on Rhodes campus and identified them (fifty years ago, so I don't remember the taxonomic details). They're nowhere as spectacular as the much much larger Ponerines you get around here, such as Streblognathus Aethiopicus, or Plectrocena Mandibularis, but they're more common and seem to occur in most gardens with large trees. But, they're not just any old ant - they're Ponerines!
There's probably some of the mounted specimens Denis collected in the Entomology Collection at the Albany Museum. I've been meaning to visit it for nostalgic reasons...
Update 2016/04/27:
Could be these guys - Leptogenys castanea? Looks like Denis kept the ones he collected because I couldn't spot any ponerines collected by him. These are ones collected by my dad in the Alexandria Forest..
John Midgley, the entomologist at the Albany Museum, said he'd identify them if I brought in some specimens.
What I did see were the ponerines I collected at Omauni in Northern Namibia in early 1976 when doing national service. These were preserved in cane spirits and posted to my dad, as was a mutillid which got caught in the hole in the top of a tin of condensed milk. There's also a single curled up ponerine of a different species captured earlier at Grootfontein, and preserved in borrowed aftershave.
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