نطق چهارم

Listen to part of a lecture in an ecology class.

Termites, insect order Isoptera. Hard to think of them as more than just pests that want to eat your house, but I think you’ll be surprised at how interesting they are and how important they are to the ecosystem.

Now what do you already know about them?

They eat wood, lots of it.

Right, to be more specific, they eat dead wood, like dead trees in forests and plant litter. Their consumption of wood is like, you can think of this like recycling. Termites are recycling that litter back into soil. Their major source of nutrition comes from cellulose, the main chemical ingredient of wood and the cell walls of other plants, leaves, grasses, etc.

Now cellulose is a complex sugar. And most termites can’t actually digest it because they don’t have the right enzyme to metabolize it, to release its nutritional benefit.Now that would be a problem, but they have a special relationship with protozoa and bacteria that actually live in their digestive system.

Inside?

Yes. It’s these microscopic organisms that break down the cellulose for the termites. They’d starve without them.

A good example of…Symbiosis. Two different kinds of organisms live together so it’s good for one or both of them.Good. What else is interesting? Termites are social. They live in colonies like ants or bees. Now about the colonies. Each termite colony is founded by a male and female pair that mate and produce more termites. The termites in the colony come in several types called castes. There’s the reproductive pair, the workers that gather food to feed the colony, and soldiers that defend the colony against predators, like ants.And they communicate by?

Dancing? Like the dances bees do?

You are not too far off. Every colony has its own distinct smell, a scent that other termites within their colony recognize. If a worker finds a new food source, it secretes a trail of scent that others can follow to locate the food.

And scent plays an important role in helping soldiers defend the colony against predators. If they detect an unfamiliar scent, well, let’s say an ant is lurking around, well, the ant has a distinct smell. As soon as soldiers detect this ant’s scent, it’s a warning. They shift into an aggressive mode, ready to start defending their colony.

Termites also communicate alarm through sound. If workers or soldiers want to sound the alarm, they’ll bang their heads against the tunnels in their nest. Other termites perceive the vibrations through special sensory organs on their legs and come running to defend their colony, so they are pretty complex animals. I hope you are getting a sense of that.

Eventually, a colony swarms, oh, sorry, got ahead of myself.Only termites that can reproduce have wings and that’s only so they can fly to a new location, find a mate, and establish a new colony. So eventually these special winged termites fly off in enormous numbers to form new colonies. They break off their wings after they land. In fact, that’s how I knew I had an infestation in my house a few years ago. Pretty amazing sight. Nothing I ever wanted to see in my house. There were so many wings on the floor and windowsills. I called an exterminator of course to get rid of them, but I kind of had mixed feelings about it.

You are kidding.

It’s true. You see, the problem with destroying termite colonies is that they are really so crucial. Remember I said they recycle plant litter?

In addition to creating new soil, termites themselves are a major source of food for other organisms, such as salamanders, frogs, lizards, and birds, which are preyed upon by other organisms. They are part of an ecological cycle. So it has an impact if too many termites are removed from the ecosystem.

Sorry professor, but I would be more concerned about them eating my house. As I was. Which reminds me of an article I wanted to tell you about. Someone recently coined a term, decompiculture. And let me write that down.

Decompiculture is the idea that humans should cultivate organisms that can decompose our waste. The professor suggests in this article that we intentionally raise them. Humans create a lot of waste that often gets dumped into landfills or water sources. It’s really just pollution.

Well, this waste can be fed to termites. Waste like…From sawmills or papermills? So termites could help us.

Yes, when you think about I, it’s actually another kind of symbiotic relationship that humans would cultivate with termites.