Termites

NOTE: Blogger has changed how pictures are displayed when you click on them. To see full size first click on the picture then right click and hit view image. This will let you see the full resolution picture.  grrrrrrrr!

This is a blog that I've known I'd write from the beginning of my trip. This topic is actually one of the reasons for this blog. At some point I realized that Americans don't really understand the reality of termites. In the US we occasionally tear into a wall only to find that somewhere in the dark these insidious insects have been eating us out of house and home. Termites are our worst nightmare.

Dad next to an anthill.

In Africa termites, also know as white ants, are ubiquitous. In talking with Charlie about this topic, he said he'd heard that there were 3,000 different species* of white ants in Africa. Where in America they tend to keep to the dark, here their presence is out in the open. A person's daily encounter with them takes various forms. The largest and most in your face is an anthill. For whatever reason in Kenya I saw no anthills at all. As I moved into Uganda a few small scattered anthills began to appear, all of these were low squat things of no more than a few feet in height. Moving south through Tanzania they got somewhat larger. Zambia has the largest by far on this trip. I don't know if I continued south whether they would get bigger or as the temperature dropped they would again shrink in size. Naturally, different types of ants build different styles of anthills. For whatever reason, once they reach a certain size they don't seem to get much bigger. While I was in the bush I asked the Zambians how old they thought that they were. They just groaned and said that they had to be there when the world was created.

Chimney style anthill

Let me limit myself to the most common large type found here for a second. These anthills are as large or larger than a house. They are made by the ants ingesting clay and then carrying it to the build site and depositing-wiggling their heads from side to side- it much the same way a bee might wax for it's comb. For the most part they are solid with voids varying from the size of a fist to the size of a volleyball, in which they appear to farm fungus for food*.

Fungus farm, notice a few peeking out at the bottom

These farms are made of plant material brought from the surface and look 'brain' like. In this farm area there were also a colony of spiders which prey on the termites. They disguise themselves by attaching the bodies of their victims to their back. It would seem that the hill also provides a means of regulating the temperature, which may mean that once it gets to a certain size it need not get any bigger. After the recent rains the ants built an addition which you can see as being rough and is less than two weeks old (see pictures near bottom of the page). Previously there was a small area that always appeared to me slightly moist there. I wondered if there was a small amount of air passing through but never dug into it to investigate. Naturally if we assume that this anthill is hundreds of years old this is not its first colony. Indeed, often there is no apparent activity on the majority of anthills. While in the bush the visibility was often only 100 yards but I was seldom out of sight of at least one anthill, and more normally three were visible at any given time.

A vent down into an anthill. The clay was built loosely here.

On the way out of town they put in a power line and dynamited the tops of anthills to have them out of the way. What were normal mound style have in the intervening years grown chimney style tops. This also suggests that there is a level that for what ever reason they need.

The hills themselves are usually covered with trees. Growing up I always wondered if the tree came first or the other way around. This is not an unreasonable query. At times houses are overrun very rapidly by a mound and in a few years a fair size hill is built. Indeed I have noted a few places in towns that the fairly large, usually chimney style anthill are besides the road. While road maintenance is generally kept to a minimum, the anthills would have been destroyed when they put in the road. The vast majority of anthills are covered with trees and those trees got there after it was built. Not all trees grow at the same rate and some types of trees do seem to favor anthills but generally bush trees mature slowly. It is safe to say that many trees are sixty to eighty years old. Besides the trees that seem to favor anthills, bamboo, cactus and a type of mother-in-law tongue also tend to grow there. The bush bamboo that I'm thinking of was also found along rivers and streams on my recent trip to the bush. Why this was-or even if it was-is something my companions had never given much thought. Upon bringing it up they did indeed agree that bamboo likes to grow on anthills. Dad thinks it will grow on open ground so my theory may be shot. Regardless, the bush bamboo usually only grows in small clumps. Both Carlie and Rob attested to the fact that the outside of anthill are fertile. Rob has cut down a number of them in his field. He says that once you get below the surface they have high sodium. Now I know sodium by itself is an unstable metal that explodes when it comes in contact with water so no doubt it is sodium+something. What I don't know, it could be common salt. The solution is to add gypsum. This will allow water to penetrate and break down the clay in the soil.

Elephant damage

What ever the minerals in the soil, elephants seem to like it. I don't know if the ants intentionally brought up certain minerals or it was in the soil and they brought it up incidentally. As you can see the elephants have dug into this particular anthill. The scouts tell me that there have been no elephants in this area for ten years yet the clay soil is strong enough to not collapse. There were a few anthills in the bush that had been dug out in this way but by no means all. If it was because once started it was easier to continue or not all had what the elephants wanted I just don't have any way of knowing.

Kiln and the anthill it came from.
 Just keep whacking on that sucker, why not!

These large anthills are a valuable commercial resource for the Zambians. In town here there is a housing shortage on. Most everyone with an anthill is using it for the clay to make bricks. Brick making is hard, heavy work which people prefer to do as close to the build site as possible to keep down transport costs. Often in the villages the bricks are never burnt. A house is simply built with mud for mortar and mud bricks. Sometimes, because the only difference between a brick that will last, and one that wouldn't, is building a kiln and burning it a few days, they do that. They still don't have money for mortar, but clay and firewood is locally available so they build with mud mortar and burned bricks. If the roof is not kept up the wall may fall down but the bricks will be reusable. One of the scouts told me enough bricks for a small house could be produced in three weeks by one man full time. For the locally sourced, sustainable crowd everything for a villager's house is available to them from the bush basically for free. However, because of wood-bores and the inferior nature of the local grass the entire roof needs to be replaced every couple of years. Termites also help play a part in the demise of a house, although there are woods they will not eat.

The small style seen throughout the plain

So, I have discussed the large type of anthill. In the open planes especially, there is another type of anthill. These are small round topped columns. The smallest is about five inches in diameter and eight inches tall. Over the years they grow to maybe as much as eighteen inches across and two feet tall. The small ones are especially easy to kick over and if they end up close enough to their colony they will continue to be used with the next year's growth coming out of what was the side. I asked the scouts who, besides me, was knocking over these small anthills. They told me monkeys or baboons.(I don't remember) Our primate cousins have found out that inside of these are white ants which they like to eat, but they are none too bright. Having knocked over an anthill and eaten the panicking ants on the bottom they never take the next logical step of throwing it on the ground and breaking it to get the rest. A few times I did see something had dug into the side of these hills whilst they were still standing and was told it was some type of bird. I don't think this is it's main source of food since I only saw this a hand full of times. These anthills are mostly hollow, with walls forming chambers.

You can see this years new growth.
This took less than a week to add.

Finally, most white ants live in the ground. I don't know if they also live in anthills or they are another type that don't build anthills at all. They build clay shells around sticks and branches as well as tunnels and such up trees. It would be hard to walk across a yard and not find a stick which didn't have the ants protective shell built around it. with most of the native trees they simply eat the dead bark on the outside and leave the live wood alone.

I whacked a chunk into the new growth

So, Africa has termites which would make an American exterminator swoon.  So what? Well, a few obvious whats are you don't build houses with wood and expect it to be there long. There are things you can do with chemicals and types of wood that are better than others. Most houses are built with solid brick walls. Brick here is not a veneer but a structural component. Before colonization most people built houses to keep themselves dry and warm at night and that was about it. The climate is pleasant and cooking was done over wood so a wall-less cooking structure was adequate for living.

White ants repairing their home. There are 3 sizes.
Big gaurds, small gaurds and workers.
This is after 20 min work

Besides you could see who was coming so it was also friendlier. People didn't live in a building once someone died in it and they also moved about a bit* so there was no expectation that a building should be permanent. Even today, land in rural places is for the taking by the people who live there. If you wanted to move to a relatives' village, just find a spot and build your hut. So buildings in the bush are not viewed as a failure if they are not there in ten years. Not that there was any paper but if there had been it too would have been eaten. A number of my parents books have spots chewed out where they had been on a shelf that they didn't notice ants had climbed the back. Sub Sahara Africa has almost no record of its history. How much we would have if we had the same relentless destruction in our libraries who can say. This part of the world never wrote the books because...why bother.

Beyond houses and books the influence of white ants extends to something I have never really heard discussed. Food. Well sure they will eat your stored corn if you let them. What they do to the soil is  probably worse. I don't know what their whole digestive cycle is, but termites do eat a tremendous amount of dead plant material. It is true they do break down some cellulose and move it into the soil. What they do is compete with earthworms for food. Reading one of Rob's agriculture magazines, the writer made a passing comment about it. His comment was that termites carry off much of the nutrients from crops tilled in at the end of the year where as worms incorporate it into the soil and much of the nutrients stay right in the area. What I know for sure is we have very poor soil. Without fertilizer most fields need a few years rest after only three years of crops. With all the tropical growth this ought not be the case.

After a rain they come out at dusk to mate
and start new colonies.
Most are eaten by predators. Some get eaten by people.

So are termites an out of control menace? No. There is balance. The Kaonde have no word for ants in general. Each variety has its own specific name. The most pervasive are what we refer to as "crumb ants". It is this type that the Bible translators chose to use in the passage that says "go the ant, consider her ways". While these ants eat anything, they often take on white ants that have been disrupted and move into at least portions of their homes. Evidence of white ants existence can be readily seen everywhere but they are vulnerable and must live in their protective dirt tunnels and anthills.

*I have done no actual research for this blog. Anything you read should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.