Amazing World of a Termite Mound

Termites are social insects working together to form a characteristic site seen all over the bush. That's a termite mound. Actually it's a tip of the iceberg. The termite city extends way beyond that underground and its function is fascinating. It's essentially an air conditioning system. What it does is maintain very specific conditions inside the mound, the conditions of the rainforest. When the termites first colonized the savannah some 30 million years ago, they brought the rainforest with them to support a form of life that was already wonderfully adapted to living off dead wood. This is what these termite mounds are all about. You see those structures there, those white honeycomb-like structures, those are called fungal combs. They're wood pulp and possibly bits of dead grass that the termites bring in and build into that structure and the reason the conditions have to be the same as the rainforest is because they grow a particular genus of fungus called termitomyces around those honeycombs. The job of that fungus is to break down the lignin and the cellulose inside the wood and convert it into a form that the termites can eat, which actually you can see there that are little white nodules just present on the honeycomb structure. The termites lack the enzymes to break down the wood efficiently, so they've become farmers, tending to one giant social stomach. So there's a very intense relationship between the termite and the fungus. You don't find that fungus anywhere else, actually in the world as far as we know, other than inside termite mounds. And it's thought that up to 90 percent of the carbon locked up in lignin in this part of Africa is released back into the food chain again solely by those termites and that fungus.