Summer rainstorms often come unexpectedly. If you live in the outskirts of a city in the south, you must not forget to turn off the lights, otherwise, the next morning, there may be thousands of termites covering the room On the ground, waiting for your “inspection”. They may be russet, or white, yellowish, or black, etc., and may be around 30mm in length, or shorter or longer. If you are lucky, you can even see a few termites wriggling in a dense pile of termites, their wings fluttering when the breeze blows. Seeing this scene, you will naturally think that insects usually have phototaxis, but why do termites fall on the ground and not fly away?
It is necessary to understand the living habits of termites. Termites are found in tropical and subtropical regions and feed on wood and cellulose. They live a social life, including queen ants, queen ants, worker ants, soldier ants, etc., and their mission is basically the same as that of ants. Although people call termites “ants”, in fact, termites and ants are two different species, and termites are semi-metamorphic insects. “Dwellers of the Darkness”.
Due to living in the dark for a long time, termites will naturally not go out for food, which may lead to food shortages, difficult to survive, or even endangered. In order to prevent this from happening, they have further refined the family members, and divided a level of breeding ants that are specifically responsible for reproduction. Breeding ants are divided into wingless, short-winged and long-winged ants, but only the long-winged ants retain both eyes, and their task is to develop outward, expand their territory, and make the family continue.
The termite queens reproduce tens of thousands of long-winged ants every year, but these long-winged ants cannot go out casually. Only at a certain time of the year, the worker ants will dig an exit from the cave and let them fly from the nest. out. This situation is very similar to human marriages, where dates need to be selected and relevant ceremonies held. The marriage day of termites must meet the two conditions of hot weather and humid air, so it usually occurs before and after the summer showers. Miraculously, the long-winged ants from all nearby nests will fly out at the same time during this period.
The only thing the long-winged ants have to do after flying out of the nest is to fall in love, and will not return to the original nest. The biological world names this phenomenon “marriage flight” or “separation flight”. Although long-winged ants have two pairs of wings, they have poor flight ability, so they will gather near lower buildings during the day and tend to be flooded with lights at night.
These places are the platform for the termites to meet collectively. When both of them liked it, they held hands and fell in love with each other, and then they both shook off their wings and found a piece of land or a cave to burrow into. After that, the pair of breeding ants “founded the country” again and became the ant queen and ant queen, giving birth to piles of children.
If tens of thousands of breeding ants “establish a country”, wouldn’t all life and property be destroyed? There is no need to worry about this. Although termites fly out in large numbers, very few can really succeed. Because of their limited flying ability and automatically shaking off their wings, they often become the “dish in the plate” of natural enemies such as frogs, birds and spiders. And after entering the room, it is even more sweeping. They can’t find any gaps to drill into, and they can only wait for you to bite the bullet and clean it.
Under normal circumstances, termites are indeed “evil”. They can destroy almost everything, including cables and steel, but they are also very valuable. Dr Hannah Griffiths, an entomologist at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, and her team were studying the impact of termites on the forest ecosystem. They unexpectedly found that in a forest that had suffered from severe drought, the rainfall in the area with dense termites was two times that of a normal year. times, where the soil is still moist, more saplings are sprouting, and the ecosystem is still functioning well, protecting the forest from climate change, like ecological insurance.
So, how to make termites serve human beings is a topic worthy of study.
