Kid Zone Articles
Termites: God's Pint-Sized Builders
Used by permission, Alpha Omega Institute
Have you ever been to a large city and seen a skyscraper? A
skyscraper is a very high building designed for people to work or live
in. A well-designed skyscraper must be made strong enough to hold up in
strong winds and earth tremors. It must be able to have the
inside air circulated, and heated or cooled. A lot of special
design goes into making a skyscraper.
Termite
mounds (or termitaries) are the skyscrapers of the animal world. Some
of these mounds are up to 20 feet high (some of the world’s tallest
animal mounds)! The builders are termites. Most termites are tiny, soft
bodied, white insects that must have a dark moist place to live. Some
termites will die if left in the open air for more than a few hours.
Most avoid light and can thrive only where there is warmth and high
humidity. They must also have fresh moist air. Termites construct their
mounds to meet these needs. Their mounds are built with a complicated
ventilation system.
Termites use spit and mud to build the hard, thick walls. Very
close to the surface of these walls are tiny tunnels. Air is heated by
the bodies of the termites and their fungus. This warmed air
rises, and tiny tunnels carry the rising warm air close to the
surface of the mound. The termitary walls are porous, or have
tiny holes. The tiny tunnels are so near the porous surface that
cooled, fresh air can actually leak into the inside air and stale air,
and other gases can leak out. Thus the mound acts like a giant
lung and constantly refreshes the air inside. Amazingly these
walls also keep the rain and the heat out!
This air moving system works so well that the temperature inside
the mound is kept .at a steady 64° all year- no matter what the
temperature is outside. Without ventilation and cooling, the
termites would die within hours. Each huge termite mound is built
by worker termites. Worker termites also repair the mound, take
care of the king and queen, gather food, and tend the eggs. Amazingly,
these tiny workers are blind!
The
queen, king, and soldiers have eyes. Each mound has one queen and one
king. The queen can lay more than 30,000 eggs a day! There are also
soldier termites which defend the colony with their large heads and
powerful jaws. They have such large jaws that they cannot feed
themselves, but must be fed by the workers. Some termites grow
fungus to eat, but others have to go outside for food.
Termites have a special smell (pheromones). When workers stumble
into food they leave a scent trail for others to follow. Workers
have a different smell than soldiers. If a lot of soldier termites are
killed during a battle, there will be less of the soldier smell
inside the mound. The queen, down in her egg laying chamber, can
sniff the air, and somehow she knows that there are not as many
soldier termites. So she begins to lay soldier eggs, to replace
those that are missing!
Wood
eating termites live on wood. Have you ever tried to eat wood? You can
eat wood all you want, but it won't do you much good, because we cannot
digest the cellulose in wood. Wood eating termites, like you, cannot
digest cellulose! So how do they do that? They live in a symbiotic or
mutual relationship with teeny critters called flagellates.
These wee creatures live in the intestine of the termite.
Flagellates cannot live in the pen air. They must have a place with no
free oxygen to live or they will die. These tiny flagellates make
enzymes that break down the cellulose of wood and also supply
protein. They digest the wood for the termite.
This symbiotic or mutual relationship between the termite and the
flagellate can only be explained by Creation. With too much oxygen,
the flagellates die and then so does the termite because he can’t
digest his food. They need each other to live. Apart, they both
die. How can evolution, a process of chance and accident, explain
that? And how do termites know how to build? Did they learn by
chance and accident or trial and error? How could they have
survived before they learned how to build their complicated homes? Can
evolution explain that? I don’t think so. Everything about the
termite points to design--a design that had to work the very
first time, and every time thereafter. The design of the termite
points to God the Creator!
