For 4,000 Years, Termites Have Been Building Something Incredible in Brazil
For 4,000 Years, Termites Have Been Building Something Incredible in Brazil
Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.
Ed Yong
11:00 AM ET
In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.
Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.
Termites are well known for creating elaborate nests, with vast networks of underground tunnels. Many species create skyscraping chimneys atop these lairs to ventilate the underground chambers, and in some African species, these mounds can tower 30 feet high. But the Brazilian mounds are neither chimneys nor nests. They’re just amorphous lumps of soil, with no internal structures. Nothing lives inside them. Instead, “they’re just slag piles,” says Funch.
The local termites create extensive subterranean labyrinths of tunnels, and they eject whatever soil they don’t need on the surface. The process is slow and gradual, but the termites have been at it for millennia. They’re more like a geological force than an organism. Just as rivers or glaciers sculpt the landscape around them, so too have these tiny insects sculpted some 90,000 square miles of Brazil into a junkyard that’s visible from space.
These mounds are known as murundus, and rather confusingly, they’re different from other mounds called campos de murundus. The latter are found in the wet, savanna-like areas of southern and central Brazil instead of the dry northeast, and it’s not clear whether they’re built by termites at all. Campos de murundus have also been well studied for decades; by contrast, the northeastern murundus, though well known by locals, have been largely neglected by scientists.
Funch first saw them three decades ago, when he arrived in Brazil as a Peace Corps volunteer. After an unsatisfying stint doing administrative work in the nation’s capital, he found a more compelling life in Lençóis, a former diamond-mining town in the east. Surrounded by forests, waterfalls, and caves, Funch became a tour guide, national-park director, and environmentalist. And wherever he went, he kept noticing the striking mounds. He wrote about them in local popular-science magazines, but never managed to stoke much interest in them.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/brazil-termite-murundus-mounds-space-4000-years-old/576160/
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