In September of 2005, I was out hiking in Arizona’s Santa Rita Mountains. It was the first time I’d been there, and it was wondrous. Everywhere I looked, I saw some miraculous creature that I’d read about, but had not dreamt of seeing in-person.
A case in point – there was a column of Nasute Termites marching by the side of the trail. They were walking following a branch that was about a foot off of the ground, going from one dense clump of vegetation into another. It’s the only time I’ve seen them walking in a column like that.
The Nasute worker (left) looks like an ordinary termite worker, except it it is more darkly colored. The soldier is quite a bit smaller than the worker. Chiricahua Mountains, Arizona, 2005-08-07.
So…what’s cool about these creatures? You may notice that the soldier caste has a strange looking head. The back of their heads are large and bulbous, and the front of their heads are drawn out into long, pointy ‘nose’ – the rostrum.
The rostrum is acts as a nozzle, and the soldiers use this nozzle to spray strings of sticky poison. In the words of Thomas Eisner, these soldiers are essentially mobile artillery units.
When they detect a threat, the soldiers shoot strings of sticky, glue-like toxic chemicals at the threat. When they spray, the soldiers jerk their bodies forward and back as they move their heads from side-to-side. These movements make the spray go out swirl like a sticky, toxic string, looping around the threat.
I think of these termites whenever I see people playing with those spray cans of Silly String:
As well as being toxic, the termites’ sticky strings also contain an alarm pheromone, which attracts still more soldiers. The soldiers form a ring around the threat, ‘covering’ it with their nose-guns until the threat stops moving(!). The soldiers are blind, and seem to detect the threat’s movements via air currents.
In the continental US, we only have two species of Nasute Termites. Tenuirostritermes tenuirostris occurs in the Southeastern Arizona. Tenuirostritermes tenuirostris and T. Tenuirostritermes cinereus occur in Southwestern Texas. Worldwide, though, the Nasutiterminae are much more diverse. I think there are at least 80 known genera.
Here’s an interesting item I came across when I was reading up on these termites. I’m accustomed to the non-reproductives (workers, soldiers, etc) of social insects being females. That is emphatically not true of termites – they may have male or female workers and soldiers. Which seems strange to me, an ant person.
But then I came across this statement of Dr Lee etal (2017): “…Rhynchotermes perarmatus has all male workers but all female soldiers, while Tenuirostritermes tenuirostris has the reverse…“. If I’m reading that correctly, all T. tenuirostris soldiers are male, while their workers are all female.
That strange popping noise you might have heard was my head exploding.
Termites are weird.
Sources:
Echternacht, Arthur C. 1967. Ecological Relationships of Two Species of the Lizard Genus Cnemidophorus in the Mountains of Arizona. The American Midland Naturalist, Vol 78, No 2 (Oct 1967), pp 448-459.
Eisner, Thomas, Maria Eisner, Melody Siegler. 2007. Secret Weapons: Defenses of Insects, Spiders, Scorpions and Other Many-Legged Creatures. Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press (April 30, 2007). 384 pages. ISBN 0674024036.
Lee, T.R.C, T. Bourguignon and N. Lo. 2017. Female-only workers and soldiers in Schedorhinotermes intermedius are not produced by parthenogenesis. Insectes Sociaux 64, 133-139 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00040-016-0523-x
Lubin, Yael D. and G. Gene Montgomery. 1981. Defenses of Nasutitermes Termites (Isoptera, Termitidae) Against Tamandua Anteaters (Edentata, Myrmecophagidae). https://doi.org/10.2307/2387872.
Nutting, W.L., M.S. Blum and H.M. Fales. 1974. Behavior of the North American Termite Tenuirostritermes tenuirostris, with special reference to the Soldier Frontal Gland Secretion, its Chemical Composition, and Use in Defense. Psyche. Volume 81, March, 1974. pp 167-177. Biotropica Vol 13, No. 1 (March 1981), pp. 66-76.
Many thanks to Dion Hinchcliffe, who published the “A person who has been sprayed with Silly String” photo on Wikipedia under a Creative Commons License: Dion Hinchcliffe, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons – https://www.flickr.com/photos/dionhinchcliffe/3634017121/
Note: I unfortunately did not get photos of the Nasutes marching in a column on that first day I saw them. The Nasute photos in this post are ones I took of Nasutes that I found while I was looking under rocks for ants.