Meat ant some are inquilines and live in the nest commensally. Unused or abandoned areas inside colonies are sometimes occupied by other species of ants and in some cases, termites. Meat ants may deliberately destroy the colonies of the termite "Amitermes laurensis" if competition between the two intensify. Meat ants play an important role in seed dispersal. A meat ant colony is capable of dispersing 334,000 individual bellyache bush seeds per hectare, which shows a strong ant-seed relationship among the two. Meat ants are able to kill poisonous cane toads, an introduced pest, as the toxins exuded by toad, that usually kill
Meat ant chambers where the population remains during the winter. In the upper areas of the colony, the galleries and shafts only account for 7–10% of nest space. For example, the galleries of excavated colonies occupy whereas the total volume is around . Overall, a nest may dwell extremely deep beneath the soil as excavated nests are as deep as . A diurnal species (active mainly during the day), the meat ant shows minimal interaction with nocturnal ant species when their territories overlap. The meat ant and other members of the "I. purpureus" species group are regarded as a dominant group of