Eastern Subterranean Termite

• The workers are blind and soft-bodied: they cannot bear light or dry air, so they build mud tubes to cross exposed surfaces, and those tubes are the first sign of an infestation.
• It digests cellulose thanks to symbiotic protists housed in its gut, which it passes from one individual to another by exchanging fluids.
• A colony can keep several secondary kings and queens, which lets it survive even if the founding pair is removed.
• It does not digest cellulose by itself: it depends on symbiotic protists in its gut, a trait of the so-called lower termites.
• A mature colony has between 60,000 and several million workers and can last ten years; the soldiers make up only 1 or 2% and cannot feed themselves.
• A colony gets through about five grams of wood a day, the equivalent of some thirty centimetres of a two-by-four a year.
• In the United States, treating and preventing subterranean termites costs some 2 billion dollars a year.
• It is regarded as native to the south-eastern United States and invasive in Canada, Europe and South America; what was called Reticulitermes santonensis in France turned out to be this same species.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Underground nests in damp soil close to wood; it builds mud tubes to reach the wood without losing moisture, and the colony spreads across satellite nests linked by tunnels

Sexual maturity

The king and queen mate continuously throughout the life of the colony and can live around 20 years; unlike ants, termite colonies have a permanent breeding male because the female cannot store as much sperm

Gestation / incubation

The eggs hatch into an earlier stage called a larva, with no wing buds or eyes; that larva moults into a worker, and the workers can then moult into a soldier or a nymph, and from there into an alate or a secondary reproductive

Litter / clutch size

A mature colony ranges from 20,000 to five million workers. The primary queen lays between 5,000 and 10,000 eggs, though sources disagree on whether that is per year or per day.

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (es): Reticulitermes flavipes · GBIF, ficha Reticulitermes flavipes (por ano) · Encyclopedia MDPI y otras fichas (por dia) · Ohio State University Extension (BYGL), ficha Eastern subterranean termite · Fichas de identificacion de Reticulitermes flavipes · Ninnescah Biology Field Station (Wichita State University), ficha Eastern subterranean termite

Best time: Spring, when the swarms of alates emerge after days of rain

The pins mark the parks where its presence is documented.