Last month, Michele Francis, an environmental scientist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, relocated to central Connecticut only to discover that her new home showed signs of termite damage. When an exterminator suggested setting out traps, Dr. Francis demurred. “I wondered if I could persuade the termites to eat the trees around my house rather than the house itself,” she said. “I hold termites in high esteem.”
humans didn’t even start building cities until that colony was already 23,000 years old
Termites are masterful soil engineers capable of erecting cathedral-like edifices out of dirt, saliva and feces. To create and maintain their homes, they become miners, masons, scaffolders, plasterers and roofers. Working together, they don’t just build simple nests; they install air-conditioning, central heating and even security devices. In Namaqualand, the termite activity over thousands of years has resulted in the formation of a hard layer of calcite (the same mineral that limestone is made of), which protects the colonies against predators that are strong diggers, such as aardvarks. “When we dig a soil profile that breaks any part of the mound, we see that the termite soldiers and workers switch into a sort of emergency mode and appear almost instantly,” Dr. Francis said. “The soldiers guard the tunnels and the workers do the repair work.
Unlike ants, which run out of their nests en masse and bite, termites are amazingly efficient.”
I need to get back to reading Serpent’s Reach. There’s a race of space ants that are super old. Bit older than 10s of 1000s of years though.
Based and Fabianpilled. Ant-based industry and computers are a crucial technology of spider society in
reverse spoiler since it's the title of the thing that the above is a spoiler for
Children of Time
and they do use ants for mining and forestry
Wildest thing is, termites are actually a social cockroach.
Yeah convergent evolution is wild
