Termites!

Happy Holidays everyone! I hope this season finds you happy and well. I am doing fine, and enjoying once again the wonderful privilege of being a world traveler. I currently am in Seattle, looking out at the beautiful snow and also looking forward to seeing some family when this snow melts enough for me to get out and about.

This snow scene is a bit incongruous, I admit, with the blog topic I have mentally been working on for some time: termites. They are amazing creatures, and I reflect on this every time I have engaged in chemical warfare with the ones in residence under our car park in Lusaka. I feel quite a bit of guilt as I sprinkle the powder called Blue Death on these industrious creatures…

But first a bit of natural history: according to Wikipedia, there are an estimated 4000 species of termites in the world. They typically live in large colonies that are self-organized and use swarm intelligence (like bees). The colonies contain nymphs, soldiers, workers and reproducers (such as one or more queens). What I have seen first hand are many of the small white-bodies workers, and swarms of winged alates that appear just after the rains start and form amazing clouds at dusk for a few nights. These alates don’t fly very well and their wings fall off readily (a month or so ago there was a day when the surface of the pool I frequent was well covered with them), but they seem to exist long enough to deposit eggs in the ground to start new colonies.

In the U.S. termites are known for living in houses, but in Zambia they typically dwell in the earth. The different species form mounds of different sizes, often making large hills (several meters tall and wide) with distinct flora and fauna compared to the surrounding flat lands. Another impressive species makes the many small hard mounds shown in this picture with a vervet monkey (taken in Kasanka National Park last July).

The ones that are most impressive to me at the moment, though, are the ones living under our car park. They are hollowing out the earth, making holes that appear to go down at least a meter. There will be no sign of them for a couple of days (after some chemical warfare on our part) and then after a rain we will wake up in the morning to a new hole with an impressive blossom of freshly excavated dirt around it, with delicate channels full of termites passing back and forth. The pictures here show one morning’s discovery, complete with two holes. Strangely, while both holes were new, only one had a pile of excavated dirt around it (about 30 cm in diameter). Perhaps they had a one-way traffic pattern? This decaying colonial house that I share with some friends also has a one-way traffic line of ants currently entering the bathroom through a hole in the wall, passing between the tiles and the wall, and then exiting out the window – but I digress… These holes in the car park do have some risks associated with them (Visitors falling in? Or cars falling in?), thus the chemical warfare, but I do feel guilty about the lives of these amazing creatures that we are destroying… any sage advice would be most appreciated.