Know Who Else Loves A Warmer Earth? Termites - And Australians Are Finding Out What That Looks Like
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Termites are crazy about heat, the study confirmed and quantified. For every 10-degree Celsius (18-degree Fahrenheit) increase in temperature, their “wood discovery and consumption” increased almost sevenfold. The Australian species is the most primitive of all termites, the closest to the root of the evolutionary tree. Also called “mastos” or giant northern termites, they have a breeding superpower: Almost any member of a colony can transform itself into the breeding queen if the previous monarch is felled. Not only that, they have a broad palate and have been known to eat lead, plastic, leather, ivory and asphalt. Cook once treated a colony that took to a concrete building’s water pipes and climbed eight stories.
The species has long been an infuriating part of life in the tropical north of Australia, the only place it once was found. But over the past two decades, it has started establishing itself farther south. Cook spends his days driving thousands of miles across the often scorching Northern Territory. Tennant Creek — more than 10 hours from Darwin, the territory’s capital and the closest city — is the small community where he’s testing whether the termites can be blocked or at least contained with bait. The greatest worry is the impact they could have on the main town in Australia’s huge and isolated Outback: Alice Springs, population 25,000, directly in the line of their apparent advance.
“It’s a matter of when, not if,” Cook said of the prospect. “They’re going to get here, and when they get here they’re going to cause a lot of problems.”
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Temperature extremes are what have protected arid parts of Australia to date. In the country’s tropical zones, where the weather is reliably balmy, the giant northern’s gluttonous garrisons are plentiful. Like reptiles, the termites do not generate their own body heat but absorb it from the environment. Even in the tropics, when the temperature drops below 68 degrees, “these termites can barely walk,” Evans said. “It’s quite funny to see.” Frosty winter nights in Alice Springs are decreasing, though. Mean temperatures have increased by about 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) since 1910, and the number of days above 40 degrees C (104 degrees F) annually has doubled since 1950.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/01/01/giant-termites-australia-climate-change/