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Termites are specially equipped to eat and digest wood and release the trapped nutrients for recycling, writes Pushpinder Kaur
AFTER showers during the rainy season, one finds streams of tiny insects, flying clumsily out of the tiny holes made in wet-soft soil. During the following night one also finds long columns of these insects flying in circles under streetlights. These flying insects are the prospective queens and kings of white ants. These termites belong to order Isoptera of insects, which have developed wings just for their nuptial night. Most of these serve as protein-rich food for predatory insects, frogs, lizards, snakes, birds and even cats and dogs. Some of the fortunate ones, however, succeed in making pairs and lay foundations of new colonies. They make a small nest in the soft soil, lay eggs, take care of the first generation of progeny till the young ones are mature enough to look after themselves. Then mother queen and the father king stop working and take up the sole responsibility of reproduction. The dirty work of enlarging the nest or soil mound, technically called termitaria, is done by their progeny. The termitaria are par excellence architecturally designed nests where temperature and humidity is precisely regulated. There are different chambers for various purposes. The new progeny, known as workers and soldiers, look after the young ones, feed the queen and king, forage for food, grow fungus gardens, repair and guard their termitaria. Isoptera is perhaps second order of class Insecta which has an independently developed social organisation and division of labour wherein the queens and kings have with sole function of reproduction. There are soldiers who guard and protect the termitaria and workers who perform all other tasks. The other socially organised order of insects is Hymenoptera, which includes honeybees, ants and wasps. Termites made their appearance on the earth about 250 million years ago with the evolution of trees. Human beings, on the other hand, are by the most generous estimate, only five million years young on our planet. Man has tried to overpower and eliminate termites along with other insect pests to exploit nature’s resources by spraying pesticides in the fields, by painting and polishing wooden structures, but have failed time and again. The only explanation for their survival is perhaps that termites occupy a special niche among Nature’s scavengers and are specially equipped to eat and digest wood in order to release the trapped nutrients (C, N, H, O, etc) for recycling. If termites had not made their appearance on earth along with the trees, then the surface of earth would have been covered with a thick jungle of dead wood, with most of the life-giving nutrients locked in it. This would have changed the whole course off evolution on earth. In this social organisation, a queen can live from 17 to 50 years and lay 2000-3000 eggs per day. She also lives in a specially protected chamber which is sometimes three to four feet down under the earth and might be at a distance of 30-40 feet away from site where the workers have attacked the wood. Thus usually spraying pesticides at an attacked site only kills a few 1000 workers whereas their reproductive factories live safely far away and are able to replace the loss in no time. There are more than 2300 species of termites in the world and most of these are prevalent in the tropical and subtropical regions. So we have to live with the termites, respect them and find newer and more innovative ways to partly circumvent them and salvage the maximum out of nature’s bounty for ourselves. |
