African Mound-building Termite

• The mound works like a lung: its ducts and central chimney move air by differences in temperature with no active mechanism at all, holding the interior at a steady thirty degrees or so despite the swings outside.
• That principle inspired the Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, which is climate-controlled by passive ventilation and uses a fraction of the energy of a conventional building.
• The queen, distended by the growth of her ovaries, can measure about eleven centimetres and lay tens of thousands of eggs a day for years.
• The queen, once developed, measures about 110 mm and is the largest of all known termites; the workers barely reach 3.6 mm.
• It cultivates a fungus of the genus Termitomyces in gardens inside the nest: the workers chew wood and leaf litter and the fungus breaks it down, producing a continuous food supply. They have been doing this for millions of years.
• The mound works as an air-conditioning system: the workers open and close ducts to regulate the temperature and humidity the fungus needs.
• In this species it is the male reproductives that carry the fungal spores in their rectum during the nuptial flight, to inoculate the new nest.
• The mounds usually outlast the colony that built them, and are sometimes reoccupied by different colonies, of the same species or another.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Savannah and open woodland of sub-Saharan Africa

Sexual maturity

A society divided into castes: the queen and king do nothing but breed, the soldiers defend, and the workers build the mound and gather grass and leaves to cultivate the fungus the colony feeds on

Litter / clutch size

The queen lays about 20,000 eggs a day without a break, which makes her the most reproductively successful land animal known

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (Macrotermes bellicosus) · Aanen et al. (2007) · estudios sobre Termitomyces en el ecosistema de Tsavo, Kenia · Ejomah et al. (2020), PLOS ONE · Korb et al., PNAS 2018 (Universidad de Friburgo) · ScienceDirect · ficha de especie de Macrotermes bellicosus · ScienceDirect, ficha Macrotermes bellicosus · iNaturalist · Korb et al., PNAS 2018 · Applied Soil Ecology

Best time: It builds cathedral-shaped above-ground mounds that can exceed 5 metres high in the West African savanna; foraging goes on through underground galleries 2-6 cm deep