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 fourteen 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.

Habitat & environment

Savannah and open woodland of sub-Saharan Africa

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (Macrotermes bellicosus); Aanen et al. (2007); estudios sobre Termitomyces en el ecosistema de Tsavo, Kenia; Ejomah et al. (2020), PLOS ONE