Totaling up termites
Stumbling across the occasional entomological interloper is simply the price we pay for living on a planet with 10 quintillion insects. Most of us are OK with finding the occasional house spider or ant crawling along the kitchen floor. But the one type of bug we all hope to never find is the termite.
That is, unless you’re a member of a special team of researchers from UF/IFAS' Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center—then you go all the way to Honduras and pray they swarm.
Along with termite experts from several other institutions, Rudolf Scheffrahn, Jan Krecek, Vinda Maharijh and Brian Bahder scoured more than 1,000 square miles of tropical terrain last May and June to collect a complete survey of the termite denizens of Honduras.
At times, the termites surrounded them in a torrent of buzzing. Some species were carefully cherry-picked from under layers of decaying forest floor. Nevertheless, by the end of their excursion, the researchers had added 1,000 new termite samples to their collection—including 15 previously unknown species.
“The specimens collected in Honduras are providing the data necessary to understand the diversity, origins, and distribution of termites of the greater Caribbean Basin – an ecologically unique and threatened region of the New World tropics,” Scheffrahn writes in a recollection of the effort.
But why termites? The insects are unmatched by any other animal in the region in terms of both sheer population and diversity of roles played in the local ecosystem.
“Termites constitute among the greatest biomass of all animals in the tropics,” Scheffrahn writes. “While a few species are major structural pests or occasional pests of agriculture, most termite species are an unseen but vital ecosystem engineers and nutrient recyclers.”
Scheffrahn and his IFAS colleagues now hold the single largest collection of termite specimens in the world—even larger than that of the Smithsonian. It features more than 27,000 samples collected from areas such as Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala and Costa Rica.
As this collection grows, so does a comprehensive understanding of termite activity and movement throughout tropical areas. As distant as some of these locales may seem, the information is vital for those of us in Florida. Knowledge of tropical termites was essential to the successful halting of a full-fledged invasion of the exotic species Nasutitermes costalis.
The Honduras team was joined by James Chase and John Mangold from Terminix International as well as Tim Myles from the University of Toronto, Robert Setter from IDT Technologies in Vancouver and Thomas Nishimura from BASF in Seattle. The group operated out of the Pan-American Agricultural School, better known as Zamorano.
Click here to visit the English version of Zamorano's Web site
Send us your comments:
