Termite mounds in Brazil, spread over an area as large as Great Britain, can be seen from space. This ‘megacity’ contains 200 million structures built by tiny insects over thousands of years.
According to the Daily Star report, Brazil Syntermes dirus, a species of termite found in the U.S., has created a vast collection of mounds up to 7 feet high, covering an area the size of Great Britain.
It took thousands of years for each mound to be completed and the diameter of many of these mounds is up to 30 feet. However, the number of these mounds (Murunda) is so large that collectively they form a huge landmark, visible from space many miles above.
These tiny insects, a little more than half an inch long, survive almost exclusively on the decaying leaves of a single type of tree. Researchers say that their huge mounds are actually the garbage mountains of a large network of underground termite cities spanning several miles. These mounds are just like the mountains of garbage that form in the dumping yards around our cities.
These termite houses are 4000 years old
The hard, dry and barren soils of this region are not only ideal for building these structures, but are also unsuitable for farmers. This is the reason why some of the termite mounds here are 4,000 years old. This means that there has been no human activity in this area for so many years.
Although the mounds were known to local people for centuries, the vastness and stability of the structures became apparent only recently when they were seen in satellite images. “I looked on Google Earth and realized they were everywhere in the area, but I couldn’t find anything about them online,” Stephen Martin of the University of Salford told New Scientist in 2018.
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Termites collect small, spiny leaves from the nearby Caatinga forests that fall only once a year, and Martin says they are in a race to collect as much as they can. It’s like if all supermarkets were open for one day a year – whoever has the fastest car gets the most food.
To reach the supermarket as quickly as possible you need a network of roads because you are in open competition with other colonies. The researchers also said that each mound belonged to a different colony.
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