Odontotermes obesus is without doubt one of the termite species that grows fungi, referred to as Termitomyces, of their mounds. Employees gather useless leaves, wooden, and grass to stack them in underground fungus gardens referred to as combs. There, the fungi break down the robust plant fibers, making them accessible for the termites in an elaborate type of symbiotic agriculture.
Like every other agriculturalist, nonetheless, the termites face a problem: weeds. “There have been quite a few research suggesting the termites will need to have some type of fastened response—that they all the time do the identical precise factor once they detect weed infestation,” says Rhitoban Raychoudhury, a professor of organic sciences on the Indian Institute of Science Training, “however that was not the case.” In a brand new Science research, Raychoudhury's staff found that termites have fairly superior, surprisingly human-like gardening practices.
Going blind
Termites don't appear like notably good gardeners at first look. They're successfully blind, which isn't that stunning contemplating they spend most of their life in full darkness working in infinite corridors of their mounds. However termites make up for his or her lack of sight with different senses. “They will detect the surroundings based mostly on superior olfactory reception and contact, and I believe that is what they use to establish the weeds of their gardens,” Raychoudhury says. To learn the way termites react as soon as they detect a weed infestation, his staff collected some Odontotermes obesus and challenged them with totally different gardening issues.
The experimental setup was fairly easy. The staff positioned some autoclaved soil sourced from termite mounds into glass Petri dishes. On this soil, Raychoudhury and his colleagues positioned two fungus combs in every dish. The primary piece acted as a management and was a contemporary, uninfected comb with Termitomyces. “In addition to appearing as a management, it was additionally there to ensure the termites have the meals as a result of it is rather laborious for them to outlive exterior their mounds,” Raychoudhury explains. The second piece was deliberately contaminated with Pseudoxylaria, a filamentous fungal weed that usually takes over Termitomyces habitats in termite colonies.
