Termites Bring Down the House
“The termitary is a separate and perfect animal,
which lacks only the power of moving from place to place.
”
It seems that our beyond-human friends are eager to connect. Lion, Elephant and Vulture have proven to be insistent allies. This New Moon we welcome Termite to the Beyond-Human Council. The backstory is this: as most of you know, I've been working to complete a book that looks at the interface between humans and Nature as it played out in my family at the turn of the century. Lately, I've been struggling to find a fresh point of entry to the chapter that unfolds in Kenya. That's where Termite comes in - literally.
Every year at about this time, I've had unwelcome visitors from the wood-eating realm. In the past, I've tried to, uh, discourage them by spot-treating their favorite point of entry through the ceiling and window with herbal poison (I know, I know. It's still poison.) This year we had an early, mid-August rain. After a rain is when termites love to swarm. This year there were far fewer than before, but I was annoyed. I thought we had reached an agreement.
You see, last year, I explained that if they eat my house I'll have to poison them, which I prefer not to do. I threatened and cajoled and, to my amazement, they disappeared. I couldn't be sure if it was deterrence or détente. This year I saw something else: termite wisdom appeared at exactly the right moment.
This time, I thanked them for coming. I told them their timing was miraculous: their teaching is exactly what's needed. I assured them they'll be in the book, and that their remarkable ingenuity is the most perfect beginning to the story that needs to be told. I apologized and stopped making threats. The termites stopped coming into the house. I'd like to honor them and our new-found alliance by sharing an excerpt of the chapter, and some of what I've learned. It's my offering to Termite, with gratitude, appreciation and wonder.
Earth's landscapes are shaped by a Consortium of species and Selves. Each is fed by interacting with others. Among them, termites are habitat engineers on a continental scale: tens of thousands of square miles of soil are being continuously reorganized from below. In East and South Africa, the skin of the land is freckled with specialized termite mounds, evenly spaced in a self-organized lattice of hexagons. The lines between the hexagons are the boundaries where the range of one mound meets that of its neighbor. Bees, ants, wolves, and even some sandpipers and fish understand their territory in hexagons.
Seen from above, the pattern of hexagonal segments resembles a translucent tortoise shell. Inside each hexagon is a circle that is actually a sphere: the bottom half is buried, the top half protrudes aboveground. In some places, the mounds are known as fairy circles. Their domed tops are tufted with an exuberance of plants that feed and house a generosity of insects and the geckos, centipedes, crickets, beetles, scorpions and spiders that eat them. The plants themselves feed a mind-boggle of herbivores that browse between rains. The mounds and their positioning influence when and where ungulates move: impala, bushbuck, waterbuck, warthog, zebra, Topi, steenbok, eland, gazelles and even elephants and black rhinos rely on termite mounds for food. Yet, the voracious termites outfeed them: they consume more vegetation than all herbivores combined.
Inside the mound, Workers drill down fifty meters or more to reach water. They carry it back up to the nest one drop at a time, in a tiny sac in their foregut. If the soil is too heavy with clay, they bring in grains of sand, one by one. If the soil is too sandy, they fetch flakes of clay. They use a drop of fluid from their body to carry each grain. Individual grains are mixed with gluey saliva and assembled in tunnels, arches, chambers and walls with flying buttresses. The mounds store carbon, phosphorous and nitrogen; they boost aeration and improve the permeability of the soil and the absorption of water and nutrients. They deliver rainwater to aquifers; they protect against drought. When drought does take hold, the water stored in the mounds helps plants to regrow.
Workers gather leaf litter, dry wood and stalks of grass from their rooftop savanna buffet and pull it deep into their underground nest a meter or more below the surface; they can dig through solid granite or basalt. They chew their food carefully to partially digest it. Then they poop vast fields of fiber that they irrigate with a clear, shining liquid until the saturated fields grow gardens of white fungus where the Queen lays her eggs. The fungus keeps the eggs warm. During droughts, Workers ensure that the gardens stay moist. The Workers eat the fungus and transform it with secretions from their salivary glands to create specialized foods for the different members of the community. The system works well: some mounds have been occupied continuously for more than thirty thousand years.
We can think of the Consortium of landscapers as a nexus of guilds. The Detritivore Guild consumes stalks of grass, dead leaves and the odd carapace left over from someone's last meal. Tunnelers and Burrowers such as snakes, gophers and ants, belong to a vast League of Architects whose Arch-Mage is Termite. We refer to them in the singular because, although there are trillions, termites move and respond as a single intelligence. They are literally of one mind. Their soul is a group soul. Each colony is a single organism. Individual termites cannot see, think, move, feel or act by themselves. They do not feel hunger, thirst or pain. Though they are blind, they can sense indirect light through the twelve-inch-thick walls of their nest.
Oscillations in temperature drive nest ventilation. During the day, when the weather is hot, warm air moves up the flutes of the outer walls and down the central channel. Cool air at night moves in the reverse direction: up the central channel and down the walls. Exterior pores release CO2 that accumulates below. Capillary action carries rainwater from the large pores to small ones so that the large pores remain unoccluded regardless of the weather outside. One researcher says the termitary is a lung that breathes once a day. Trillions of tiny pores in the mounds are exhaling CO2 that feeds the plants that flourish on their pate; the plants inhale the CO2 and exhale oxygen that tumbles down the center of the shaft back into the nest. Imagine: the entire landscape is dotted by lungs, blooming and breathing in unison for thousands of miles in all directions. Entire deserts and plains are breathing, whole countries are breathing across borders and biomes.
Inside the mound, the termites communicate through pulses of water vapor and chemicals. They send each other telegrams and sometimes long letters in the form of pheromones and gases. They sense vibrations as waves in the ether. The Queen sends out a communal signal that enables the termites of a colony to recognize each other. She lives out her life as a sedentary, segmented worm, larval and immobilized, encased in a tight chamber several feet deep in the ground. There she lays thirty thousand eggs a day. The King stays with her to fertilize the eggs that hatch into Nymphs that become Soldiers and Workers. The Queen produces miniscule drops of termite pablum to feed them. The King and the Workers feed and groom her. The Soldiers patrol the perimeter and defend the colony with their mandibles and pincers; in an emergency they exude drops of stinging acid. Workers forage for food and water; they build and repair the nest; they tend to newborn Nymphs; they groom and clean the Queen, the King and the Alates - the briefly-winged termites who swarm after a rain to found a new colony. It's a dangerous foray into the above-ground world because swarming termites are a feast for frogs, toads, lizards, snakes, crickets, beetles, centipedes, scorpions, fish, turtles, jackals, meercats, monkeys and apes. The Alates do their best to fly after dark, but night hawks, owls and bats lie - or rather, fly in wait.
Each of the millions upon millions of mounds nubbing Earth's well-traveled hide is an island of fertility in an archipelago of abundance; each island is a dryland iceberg whose subterranean universe is so much greater than what we can see. Sometimes, after a rain, the tops of the mounds blush with sudden clusters of tiny, pale violet flowers the color of sky before sunrise. From above, the luminously blossoming mounds form a huge, pink-sequined cape, casually tossed around Africa's wide, bony shoulders, rippling across the savanna. That's the beauty of the Consortium. That's how beautiful the Consortium is.
