Termites are much more than just house-eating pests. They're interesting animals and their interactions with humans can be quite unexpected. How about termites damaging aircraft within a day of landing? Termites damage planes in other ways as well, such as landinginto a termite mound which is more common than you'd think, even contributing to a fatal crash of a US airman in WWII , so that termite mound removal is widely specified for tropical dirt airstrips, where dangerous mounds are said to “appear overnight”. In at least one case, termites fought back, hiding their mounds inside hollow plastic safety cones and have even used a crashed plane as a foundation for a mound. It is not just the dirt strips that are at risk, a concrete runway used by the military in Uzbekistan was reported to be undermined by termites threatening heavy German aircraft operating in Afghanistan.

Yes, termites can damage transportation, but more often they are found in boats and cargo. On the other hand, the people of Andros Island in the Bahamas use the mud from termite mounds to caulk their boats! It works because the termites' nest material can be more water resistant than wood.

Termites dig deeply for their nest mud, often leading to major changes in soil horizons. In some places, termites' deep digging brings minerals to the surface that would otherwise remain unseen. This has been used to find diamonds in Botswana when scattered ilmenite flakes were found and Botswanans also use mounds to find road-making gravel . Prospectors use termite nests to find gold in lots of different places and even to find uranium, nickel and copper. Termites and geologists certainly do make strange partners.

In Australia, in the early days of telephony, it took hundreds of boundary riders to fight termite attack on the posts to keep the messages flowing. Even nowadays subterranean electrical cables are sometimes ruined by termites, I've worked on these in North Queensland, South Australia and Victoria where failures cost huge amounts of money. It is a global problem.
Termites as a flood risk? In China, a special radar was developed to detect termite nests in dykes and dams. Perhaps the US Army Corps of Engineers should get one because the premature failure of levees in New Orleans was also blamed on termite nests.

Termites are a part of our culture, they appear in cartoons and jokes, films (old & not so old), TV (1,2,3,4,5,6) and fiction books such as “Lark and Termite” and “Brother Termite” which is slated to be a Hollywood movie. There's a termite display and model mound in London. My favourite termite short is episode 5 of “Good Riddance” by Nick Hilligoss in which a pest controller uses a threatening Echidna to force the termites who destroyed his home to build him a new (adobe) one. If only. There are rock bands like The Termites (sound clips) and Todd and the Termites. Another band, the Templebears (archive link) had a song called "Once more into the termite mound" And there's something out there called the termite queen (archive link). Not to forget Beck's strange song, “Loser” in which we find "my time is a piece of wax, fallin' on a termite that's chokin' on the splinters". In Leeds (UK) there's a jazz venue called The Termite Club. Stretching back at least 40,000 years, termites have been helping create the didjeridu, a hollow tree trunk that is a wonderful musical instrument. Termites were even calle din for the name of an artists' collective in Louisiana. People think about termites in a philosophical sense (1,2)and use them for political analogy. Some imagine human forms in termite nests as in this picture entitled "Mother and Child" near Darwin. There's even been a cute piece (archived) from students of Landsdowne Elementary School suggesting Lincoln Logs for a termite's Christmas present! The most dangerous and feared animal in the Australian bush is the termite according to the writers of an arty radio show (archived). Back to aircraft again, there's a new avionics system that's called Termite.  Though perhaps the weirdest use of termites for a name belongs to the Brevard Termite Youth Cheerleading crew.

We even tie termites to our religions. There's a site that links termites to Qur'an, claiming that they are examples of Allah's "flawless design". But the Book of Mormon apparently disagrees because at 4 Nephi 1:17 it says there were no "-ites" at all in America. Termites don't really rate in the Christian Bible except this odd translation of Isaiah 51 and this bit of text apparently added to Proverbs 25. Not being mentioned doens't mean that they shouldn't be included in the cargo of Noah's Ark. Perhaps termites are discerning. In this example, termites had eaten the Urdu text in a version of the Qur'an, but not the Arabic. My hero Philip Adams once pondered whether termites, like us, are "persuaded they were created in the image of God?" Others see termites as creators, as according to traditional belief in Arizona, a termite made the (flat) world. But none of this matters to termites, they don't respect churches.

The soil that termites move has long been used by people for construction, consumption and cultivation. In 2003 the Australian Government funded construction of a basketball court from termite mound material (called “ant bed”, see page 2203). Other uses include low-dust floors, for silos bricks,and water tanks and even for moulded fireplaces which makes sense given the evidence of pre-historic iron smelters in Africa that were built in or of termite mounds. Actually, there's a lot of interest termite architecture. Their big mounds are tightly temperature controlled and naturally air conditioned. Architects seek to copy these features as this grandiose plan for a super sky scraper surely shows. Could be good if you don't like windows, love saturated humidity and see no reason to separately dispose of faeces. . . .

In Australia, we have people who transport termite mounds, to place in museums (there was a huge one in the foyer of the West Australian Museum in Perth), to decorate outback-style boutiques in airport lounges and as ornaments in gardens! The Dählhölzli Museum in Bern, Switzerland has its own (live) African termite mound with over a million termites. Perhaps the weirdest artificial mound is the work of sculptor Yvonne Dorward, a six-foot high talking termite mound in the main street of Mataranka.
Dr Gary Hurd scatalogical researcher of Saddleback Community College once had pages with photos of termite poo (archived here & here). Fresh and 1,100 years old! (Stranger even, is that pest controllers can sometimes tell the species of a termite by the shape of its poo). I bet you didn't know/remember that the original movie script of Monty Python's Holy Grail, in the bit about swallows and coconuts, mentions termites.

Around the world, lots of people eat termites (it isn't as crazy as it sounds, winged termites are very nutritious, and especially when lightly fried, reasonably tasty). One guy even hoped to sell termite poo for people to consume, calling it "South Pacific Pollen". Termites are important in the diets of many ants, lizards and birds and there are quite a few specialist feeders such as aardvarks, aardwolves , echindas and numbats, but did you know that they are also eaten by lions and gorillas? Usenet news seems to always have a mention somewhere of our close relative the chimpanzee's habit of using a twig tool to fish termites from their galleries. Fish, especially salmonids, are big predators of flying termites. Termitophile anglers can get their own back with this neat design from the Goulburn Valley Fly Fishing Centre. The pitcher plant, Nepenthes albomarginata, eats termites.  Termites are also good for chicken feed and are often caught from the wild in baits.

Thinking of the variety of problems caused by what termites eat, consider their role in banking. Gracie Scruggs of the US Treasury says that termites eat more paper money than do dogs, horses and pigs. Just thinking about productivity, I doubt if anything can match the output of a mature African Macrotermes queen who it is said, can lay 50,000 eggs a day and lives for around 30 years. That's more than 25 million offspring! I find it hard to believe. Especially these guys who think a queen can lay eggs flat out all day, every day at the same rate for her whole life! Some researchers put the maximum rate at around 20,000 per day, some much higher. Even then, that's 24 hours, 24x60=1440 minutes x60=86,400 seconds or one egg every 4.32 seconds. Sure beats chickens!.

Copyright © Don Ewart 1996-2009