Termites – The Inner Sanctum

Summary:
– They don’t have eyes.
– A queen can rule over a million termites.
– They can take down houses by digging into the wood.
– Ants evolved from wasps and are not strictly vegetarian while termites evolved from cockroaches and are strictly vegetarian.
– Termites eat things like lichen to deadwood. They’ll big the wood which is softened in their system and then shredded. The fibres pass through a tract and got to a pouch with single-celled organisms called flagellates that break down cellulose. These make up a third of the termite’s body weight and termites would starve without them.
– In Kenya people respect the mounds and farmers protect them. Farmers like the moist soil around the mound.
– A young adult has wings when it’s ready to found a new colony.
– The termites in Borneo don’t have to dig for water or dig into houses because they have access to hollow tree trunks. They don’t eat the timber they live in and so they find lichen on trees and scrape it to hand over to the transporters.
– Pitcher plants distract them and trap them in their digestive juices.
– They can’t stay in the sun long as they’ll boil.
– Their thin skins are also sensitive to rain.
– In America, they are tased, gassed or poisoned but they outnumber humans. People’s homes are their dinner. In Africa, they’re not seen as pests.
– They’re good at bringing up water from deep in the ground and also bring beneficial minerals nonstop day and night.
– A mound is humid and has a lot of heat. Different species ventilate different mounds. Some vents release CO2 and methane so there is a contribution to greenhouse gasses.
– In South America, there are superhighways of termites with efficient separate lanes. They cut up the leaves. They’ve adapted to process any kind of vegetation. A pangolin is their worst enemy using its strong claws to break up the housing.
– Some of the termites are scanning for ants. The ant patrol finds the termite highway. The scent is picked up and spray acid onto the ants.
– Some ground termites get rid of extra litter to reduce a chance of fire.
– Masaai women observe a fungus garden made by termites as their source of food. So the temperature and humidity has to be right.
– In Kenya, the inner sanctum was finally found to reveal 3 queens that look like sausages while a king is 1cm to keep a queen reproducing. They set up one queen in an observable ‘room’. She keeps producing eggs, 100s every hour.