They're known as silent destroyers.
But they also hide a creepy trait
when one of their kind is dying.
We're talking about termites in this episode.
Termites are ancient.
Their fossils date back about 130 million years
to the Early Cretaceous period.
They can be found on six of the seven continents on Earth
but they prefer warmer, damper environments.
Living in colonies with populations
ranging from a few hundred
up to the millions.
In 2018, a 4,000-year-old super-complex
was discovered in Brazil
with approximately 200 million excavated mounds
So it begs the question,
how do these colonies get so big?
Well, it all comes down to the queen.
She is the founding member of a colony.
Once she mates,
she heads underground to start her life
of perpetual egg-laying.
And it really is her lifelong job now.
She will continuously lay up to 30,000 eggs per day
for 15 years.
She's tired.
That's one every three seconds.
See? We weren't kidding.
To produce that amount of eggs,
she needs to be bigger
than the rest of the termites in the colony.
Starting off as small as a dime,
but she can grow up to 11 cm (4.3 in) long.
Although this size does come with its share of problems.
She is so big and so inundated with eggs that she can't move.
So she has a team of workers tending to her every need.
This includes licking her body to keep her clean.
It gives a whole new meaning to housekeeping.
After laying around 250 million eggs
and being fawned upon continuously the entire time,
her life comes to an end.
And the workers aren't done yet.
They will start licking her more aggressively.
Not to clean her, but to devour her.
This cannibalistic trait is not fully understood,
but there's probably good reason
for the workers to do it.
Probably didn't get any overtime.
Termite colonies are giant nutrient
recycling machines.
It's no wonder they don't let the queen's body decay away.
As part of the process,
the fluids and fats are
unceremoniously absorbed out of her body.
Some research suggests that since a termite's usual diet is
low in nitrogen,
eating the queen or their fellow workers
could be a good way to get nitrogen back into the colony.
Talking about food,
termite colonies can get seriously huge.
So what do they eat to keep everything running smoothly?
If you've had any experience
with termites invading your home,
you might have the answer to this one.
Their food of choice is wood.
They can be extremely destructive
when they feed on wooden structures
and vegetable matter.
Even worse is that introduced species
are less comfortable in their new surroundings
and are more likely to shelter in our homes and buildings.
This leads to greater damage to structures
and more frustration for property owners.
That damage comes with a 5 billion dollar bill
every year in the United States alone.
That's a lot of houses, and a lot of wood.
Wood doesn't seem the most nutritious diet,
but it's chock-full of cellulose,
a complex carbohydrate made up of sugar.
Termites have special microbes in their gut
that help them break it down and turn it into food.
And what's surprising is that termites are not
born with these microbes.
They have to acquire them from others in the colony.
Here's the gross part.
The microbes can be passed on
by anal feeding.
Yeah, you guessed it. Eating the poo of other termites.
Wonderful.
If you haven't had your fill of insects yet,
then why not check out our episode on beetles that
crawl out of their predator's butts?
It always comes back to poo here.
They lick their queen to death
and cause billions of dollars of damage every year.
That's what termites do.
And that's what makes them Crazy Creatures.