Termite
jgoldman | August 2, 2010"But wait," you say. "Anteaters aren't pets!" Well, I didn't think so either. But Salvador Dali had a pet anteater. And that's good enough for me.
Figure 1: Salvador Dali taking his pet anteater for a stroll. (Source)
The Giant Anteater, Myrmecophaga tridactyla, only eats ants and termites, making it a myrmecophage. (Hey, Alex Wild, now I get what Myrmecos means!) In 1984, a researcher named Kent Redford was interested in the foraging behaviors of the giant anteater, and the relationship between these anteaters and their prey, colonies of highly social insects. So Redford went to Brazil to…
edyong | March 27, 2009Termite colonies are families - millions of individual workers all descended from one king and one queen. But the colony itself tends to outlast this initial royal couple. When they die, new kings and queens rise to take their place. These secondary royals are a common feature of some families of termites, and they will often mate with each other for many generations. But there is more to this system than meets the eye.
Kenji Matsuura from Okayama University has found that the secondary queens are all genetically identical clones of the original. There are many copies, and they have no…
edyong | March 3, 2009In the Goualougo Triangle of the Republic of Congo, a chimpanzee is hungry for termites. Its prey lives within fortress-like nests, but the chimp knows how to infiltrate these. It plucks the stem from a nearby arrowroot plant and clips any leaves away with its teeth, leaving behind a trimmed, flexible stick that it uses to "fish" for termites.
Many chimps throughout Africa have learned to build these fishing-sticks. They insert them into termite nests as bait, and pull out any soldier termites that bite onto it. But the Goualougo chimps do something special. They deliberately fray the ends…
