termites
awild | March 28, 2010I've moved some of my better termite photos to a new gallery at alexanderwild.com.
Go visit.
awild | February 22, 2010
Zootermopsis soldier termite, jaws at the ready.
If you think of termites as pasty white squishy things, here's one that'll jar your preconceptions. Zootermopsis dampwood termites of western North America have large soldiers- over a centimeter long- that are muscular and well armored.
Soldiers are deployed not against predators but against other termites, as colonies within a single rotting log fight when they encounter each other. Those jaws are ideal for slicing through an enemy queen, for example, or for protecting their own.
Photo details: Canon mp-e 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS…
awild | February 4, 2010
Termite mounds visible in Australia's Northern Territory- I've circled three, but dozens are in the image.
Central Illinois still resembles the frozen lifeless tundra, so to get my bug-hunting fix I've been surfing about on Google Earth. Here at -13.066783, 130.847383 I've found something: Australia's magnificent magnetic termites. The green things are trees, but the little black pimply bits? Those are the termites. On the ground they look like this:
A magnetic termite mound in north Queensland, Australia.
Why "magnetic"?
The mounds are shaped as thin blades along a north-south…
awild | January 28, 2010I did not expect everyone to nearly instantaneously solve yesterday's termite ball mystery. I'm either going to have to post more difficult challenges (from now on, nothing will be in focus!) or attract a slower class of reader.
Cuckoo fungus grows in a termite nest.
As you surmised, those little orange balls are an egg-mimicking fungus. It is related to free-living soil fungi, but this one has adopted a novel growth form that is similar in diameter, texture, and surface chemistry to the eggs of Reticulitermes termites. These hardened sclerotia are carried about the termite nest as if…
awild | January 27, 2010...they're something far more interesting.
Ten points to the first person who identifies the orange balls. These were photographed inside a termite nest in southern Illinois last fall.
awild | December 12, 2009
Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 20D.
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, twin flash diffused through tracing paper
edyong | May 8, 2009The success of termites Âand other social insects hinges on their complex social systems, where workers sacrifice the ability to raise their own young in order to serve the colony and its queen - the only individual who reproduces. But this social order can be thrown into chaos by knocking out a single gene, and one that originally had a role in that other characteristic termite ability - eating wood.
Judith Korb from the University of Osnabrueck in Germany found that the queen termite relies on a gene called Neofem2 to rule over her subjects. Korb worked with the termite Cryptotermes…
bleimanb | November 29, 2007Somehow termites convert to wood into energy to power their festering hordes, and now a group of scientists and engineers--representing a consortium of government and corporate institutes--intends to learn how humans can do the same to power our Ipods. The November 22nd issue of the science journal Nature discusses this new, novel approach to producing biofuels.
Ok, ok, so power plants of the mid-2000s might not be filled to the brim with writhing piles of termites as implied by the title of this article, but it's still kind of interesting. Really, the scientists are hoping to break down…
zooillogix | April 24, 2007In an embarrassing revelation for termites everywhere, researchers from the Natural History Museum of London have determined that termites are actually a highly social form of cockroach. Although they appear more similar to ants, genetic testing confirmed the relationship and definitively determined that they were a family of cockroaches. As if this wasn't humiliating enough, entomologist Paul Eggelton suggested that the cockroach penchant for coprophagy, or eating their own feces, may have led to the evolution of termite physiology and society in the first place... not cool. Speculation…