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www.blackhorsepestcontrol.ae/termite/
You hardly see them, but you can see the structural damage they cause. Termites can destroy a wooden window or door within just a year, compromising the whole structure of the house. If you find your doors decaying or feels like something is eating it, you have a termite infestation. In such a case, immediately look for termite control services provided by a reliable company. Black Horse Pest Control is a renowned company in Dubai and UAE for its superior quality termite pest control Dubai service. The company has been doing this for over a decade and has the equipment and the skill to accomplish the job.
Bicolored Mound-dwelling Tiger Beetle - Cheilonycha auripennis
(Cheilonycha auripennis auripennis Lucas, 1857)
This species is associated with termite mounds and likely preys on the termites.
References
- iNaturalist www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1410493-Cheilonycha-auripennis
- Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheilonycha_auripennis
- Catalogue of Life www.catalogueoflife.org/data/taxon/TSDH
- Guerra, J.F. (1993) Some observations of the Termite mound-dvelling tiger beetle Cheilonycha auripennis Lucas , from northeastern Bolivia. Cicindela, 25, 23–26.
Lately I visited a zoo for the first time in my life, the zoo being Twycross Zoo in Little Orton, Leicestershire, which is noted for having four species of great ape (the gorilla, the orangutan, the bonobo and the chimpanzee).
While I saw many species of animal for the first time, one that I was not unacquainted with was the meerkat; one of Twycross's meerkats is seen standing on top of a fake termite mound in the meerkat enclosure.
Immersed in a brain spa at the Santa Fe Institute today, a weekend symposium on the multi-dimensions of evolution.
The first speaker was Prof. Daniel Dennett, always entertaining and provocative.
Here he shows a termite colony on the left and Gaudi’s cathedral on the right.
“The termite has no boss. None of them understands what they have built. Gaudi was an autocratic builder.”
David Krakauer’s Introduction:
“Evolution is the most important science of the 21st Century. But it is often treated as a field that has not itself evolved. Criticizing evolution by targeting Darwin is both foolish and amusing. If Darwin dropped into one of our labs today, he would not recognize it. Our work is very experimental, quantitative and mathematical. Evolutionary biology is the most mathematical of the biological sciences.”
Dennett quotes:
The trickle down theory of creation was “obvious” to people.
The bubble up theory of creation provides one unified perspective, one elegant synoptic model.
Darwin and Turing present a strange inversion of reasoning.
Turing showed that the computer does not need to know what arithmetic is. Computers have competence without comprehension.
Understanding is the effect, not the cause.
Natural selection is an automatic reason-finder. It doesn’t have to know what it is doing. The “Need to Know” principle in the intelligence community has an analog in the biosphere, driven by thrift rather than security.
We attribute more understanding than there needs to be. We lack a familiar conceptualization of semi-understood quasi-representations.
Like life being made of non-living parts, comprehension can be made from non-comprehending parts.
Our brains are more like termite castles than Turing’s computers.
Italian newspaper headline, translated: “Yes we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.”
Branching neurons are descendants of free-swimming organisms.
When running cultural software, brains become minds.
It’s not magic; it’s teamwork.
Words are memes that can be pronounced.
For evolution, you need high-fidelity copying, but it can’t be perfect copying.
The sea shapes the designs of Polynesian boats. If the boat makes it back home, copy it.
Memes are software viruses.
We are the first intelligent designers in the tree of life.
In response to my question about inscrutability of evolved artifacts:
“Yes, reverse engineering the brain may prove infeasible.”
Termites are a group of eusocial insects that, until recently, were classified at the taxonomic rank of order Isoptera (see taxonomy below), but are now accepted as the epifamily Termitoidae, of the cockroach order Blattodea. While termites are commonly known, especially in Australia, as "white ants," they are only distantly related to the ants.
Litchfield National Park, close to Darwin, is an excellent place to view the two different types of Termite Mounds in large numbers. The robust Cathedral mounds can attain a height of 7 metres, while the smaller blade-like Magnetic mounds are constructed on an East-West axis so that the Sun's rays throughout the day are concentrated along the thicker "sharp" edge of the structure.
These geckos are quite common in area where I often go for macro walk, I find these little creatures very cute mainly these Juveniles, adults look dull and lack the colors.
Captured with Canon 750d and 18-55 kit lens, used External flash with radiant diffuser.
The Magnetic Mounds in Litchfield may be more famous but this field of Termite Mounds in Djukbinj National Park is far more extensive.
Poor old soldiers have no eyes and a huge "nose" known as a "fontanellar gun" that this species of termite has developed as a defense to ants. It shoots a chemical that reportedly stops ants in their tracks.
Tarangire National Park, Tanzania
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One reason termite mounds are the focus of so much scientific attention is that the insects don’t really live inside them. They choose instead to build their nests – which can be home to thousands or even millions of individuals – in the ground below the mound. In fact, they only travel into the mounds to repair them and defend the city below from invading ant armies and other threats.
-- BBC. Com
Thousands of these Western Subterranean Terrmites swarm in the first rain of the season, then lose their wings a few seconds or minutes after landing. Taken outside our house October 23, 2012
Scavenger Challenge - July 2017 Assignment - My Favourite Things - I love to go walking through the bush
MAGNETIC TERMITES
In the far north of Australia lies a series of extraordinary structures, Magnetic Termites that are found nowhere else on earth. My first impressions: It was like walking into an old graveyard hidden for years in the bushland, a graveyard filled with huge tombstone towers, all perfectly aligned, north to south and built by termites. They could have been the relics of a lost civilisation.
Inside the termite mound, there are thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of the worker termites. At the bottom of the mound, you would find the king and the queen. The queen is the egg-producing machine. At the top of the mound, there is the termite cemetery where they often bury their dead. The termite mound is a bit like a city. The workers are a small insect with the grey abdomen. These are essentially child labourers, termites that have developed but not into fully fertile adults. In our society, it would be like having the majority of the work done by much muscled 11 year olds. As an added handicap, these young builders are completely blind.
Using Northern Territory know how to tackle the secrets of the magnetic termites, researchers have come up with explanations as to why all these mounds point north/south, and how did meagre termites work out this universal alignment.
Termites are defenceless to temperature change. The workers and the soldiers, who make up the bulk of the population, have very thin skins. Termites are called white ants because their skins are so thin. They are so vulnerable that go much outside temperatures of 30 degrees C and these thin-skinned termites get terminated. Yet they live in one of the most climate variable places on earth. In the tropical savanna lands of northern Australia where summer, wet-season temperatures soar to 40 degrees and can plummet to near freezing at night during the winter, dry-season. In other areas, termites escape extreme temperatures by burrowing underground, but these termites also have to contend with getting flooded during the wet-season. The ground can be like a quagmire even up until around June and this year it is still wet on the ground in July. The termites have to figure out how to stay warm, stay in a stable temperature and stay dry above the ground. As the sun comes up over the horizon it warms the eastern face of the mound and will continue to rapidly warm it, heating up to about 30 degrees until the sun moves overhead about the middle of the day. Then this face will stop the rapid heating and will start to cool very, very slowly. In fact, it almost stays at a constant temperature. Then it is the turn for the western face to heat up before the sun sets in the evening.
To sort out whether termites were using the knowledge of the earth’s magnetic field to build their towers, researchers conducted a very high tech bush experiment. Normally most of the tiny cells that make up a mound aligned north/south, but when researches inserted magnets that changed the direction of the magnetic field, the termites duly followed. Once the magnetic field had shifted, the cells also shifted around in that direction. Therefore, it seemed as if the cue the termites were using for that north/south direction was in fact the magnetic field, although not officially scientifically proven.
Another question - Why are these Australian termites the only ones in the world to have lined themselves up to the magnetic field? Researcher can only speculate that it has something to do with the nature of the magnetic field in Australia. Fact is, in Australia the magnetic field does not change over time, in its direction as much as it does in other countries. Perhaps this phenomenon played its role in giving us wonderful animals like this and perhaps it is the biggest secret of the magnificent Magnetic Termites.
This termite nest was seen at Mistico Hanging Bridges Park near La Fortuna in north-central Costa Rica.
My friend Foeke brought several termites from Thailand for us to examine and photograph.
Here's the first shot. Canon 5DMkII, JML 21mm F/3.5, LED Ring light, polysterene cup for diffuser.
Member of the Termitoidae family, of the order Blattodea, the cockroach.
There are 4,000 species and about 2,600 taxonomically known.
Termites are commonly viewed as pests, because of the damage they can cause.
They divide labor among castes, produce overlapping generations and take care of young collectively. Termites may produce up to two litres of hydrogen from digesting a single sheet of paper, making them one of the planet’s most efficient bioreactors. The complex lignocellulose polymers within wood are broken down into simple sugars by fermenting bacteria in the termite’s gut, using enzymes.
(Source: Wikipedia)