{"id":7448,"date":"2019-09-01T13:02:01","date_gmt":"2019-09-01T03:02:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ppmmagazine.com.au\/?p=7448"},"modified":"2023-11-22T21:22:36","modified_gmt":"2023-11-22T10:22:36","slug":"termites-structural-engineers-and-water-managers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/termite-research\/termites-structural-engineers-and-water-managers\/","title":{"rendered":"TERMITES \u2013 STRUCTURAL ENGINEERS AND WATER MANAGERS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Australian termite researchers have investigated how termites’ clay-building behaviour is determined by their assessment of the environment around them.<\/em>
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For termite professionals, it never ceases\u00a0to amaze as to how buildings \u201cabsolutely smashed\u201d by termites do not collapse. It turns out that termites are pretty good structural engineers, using clay and moisture to manage structural integrity whilst eating as much of the wood as possible.<\/p>\n

Over the past couple of years, a team including Sebastian Oberst, Michael Lenz, Joseph<\/strong>\u00a0Lai<\/strong> and Theodore Evans<\/strong> have unravelled how termites utilise clay and moisture to exploit foraging resources.<\/p>\n

Much of their work, both in the laboratory and in the field, has utilised an experimental setup whereby small pieces of wood were placed in between two concrete pavers (see images, right). To create a situation where the wood was under load, the small pieces of wood took all the weight of the upper paver. To create a situation where the wood was not under load (yet in a similar setup to the loaded situation), metal supports were placed in between the pavers to take the weight of\u00a0the upper paver.<\/p>\n

Focusing on the activities of Coptotermes acinaciformis<\/em>, earlier experiments by the team demonstrated that foraging termites utilise clay in two different ways, depending on whether or not the wood is under load.1<\/sup><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When exploiting unloaded wood, which would be analogous to a piece of wood lying on the surface of the ground, termites will build a thin layer of clay sheeting less than one millimetre thick over the surface of the wood (main picture, above). Such sheeting provides protection from predators and from desiccation.<\/p>\n

However, when exploiting wood under load, termites create load-bearing clay walls, typically greater than ten millimetres thick. Interestingly the amount of clay used to support the exploitation of wood under load increases over time \u2013 as more of the wood is eaten, the amount of clay used for structural support increases.<\/p>\n

The experiments demonstrated that termites preferred unloaded wood to wood under load. This is perhaps not a surprise as such a food resource could be exploited quickly without the energy expenditure needed to build structural clay walls. Anecdotally, termite infestations in buildings appear to follow a similar pattern, with the non-structural timbers attacked during the early stages of an infestation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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