TERMITE TALES
Richard Dawkins hymns a termite cathedral, plus microbes rock out
TERMITE CATHEDRALS
With its towering spires and graceful columns, it’s hard to believe that this structure, resembling Antonio Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, was built by insects. The famous atheist, Professor Richard Dawkins, tweeted the image, commenting: “This magnificent cathedral, photographed by Fiona Stewart in Queensland, was built by termites. No architect (as Dan Dennett pointed out) no blueprint, not even in DNA. They just followed local rules of thumb, like cells in an embryo. Please, does anyone know the genus/species?”
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, Matt Shardlow, CEO of Peterborough-based Bugs Life, said: “What we think has happened here is something quite unusual. The colour of this termite mound is quite grey, which is very typical of the magnetic termite that lives in northern Australia, where this was photographed. They build their big mounds along a north-south line, aligned with the magnetic poles. It looks as if this particular colony has been damaged at some point, and those tall spires are the termites’ efforts to rebuild and get the height back within their colony as quickly as they can.”
The mounds are built by two species of termite, ‘magnetic termites’, Amitermes
meridionalis, and ‘cathedral termites’, Nasutitermes triodiæ. They are responsible for some of the tallest non-human structures, relative to their size, in the world. They build huge mounds up to 25ft (8m) high in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland. Now a prominent feature of the arid landscape ‘Down Under’, the mounds house millions of termites.
The structures are made from a mixture of fæces, mud and wood, which forms a robust, waterproof clay-like substance. The termites live underground, which requires an oxygen supply, and the mounds work like an air conditioning system, funnelling air down to the colony below. This also feeds the farms of fungi that the creatures nurture for nutrients. D. Mail (online), 23 Nov 2017.
PROG MICROBES
Three new species of microbe found in the guts of termites have been named after members of the Canadian prog-rock band Rush, owing to the microbes’ long hair and rhythmic wriggling under the microscope. They are covered with flagella, long threads that cells use to move around. Many cells have a few flagella, but these little rockers have more than 10,000 very long ones; they also have rhythm. They bob their heads and sway their bodies in microscopic dances, prompting researchers at the University of British Columbia to baptise the new
Pseudotrichonympha species P. leei, P. lifesoni, and P. pearti after musicians Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart. The microbe named after drummer and lyricist Peart contains a rotating intracellular structure never seen before. The researchers dubbed this the ‘rotatosome’, and even though they tested several theories, they still can’t figure out what it does. The researchers outlined their findings in Scientific Reports. Science Daily, 27 Nov 2017.