The Hamburg scientist argues that the termites' behaviour surpasses the accomplishments of that other great ecosystem engineer - the beaver.
Scientists would embed the genomes of bacteria with genes taken from termites, sheep guts or microbes that live on your lawn.
Of the two dozen independent lines, just two within the insects ants and termites globally dominate invertebrates on the land.
But Norbert Juergens says the one ever-present factor is sand termites.
Undeterred, the Roots spent two years filming the termites on their own.
However, a local vet theorized that the notoriously resilient red-footed tortoise, which could have survived long periods without food, possibly snacked on termites.
The house is still a fixer, with smelly carpeting that Gaffen can't wait to pull out, and there are some termites to contend with.
To that end, Voigt is experimenting on bacteria with plant-digesting genes, including those found in termites, sheep and bacteria that live on your lawn.
Instead, it collects, oasis-like, just below the surface where it can sustain the termites and a supply of perennial grasses at the margins of the circles.
Nor were behaviour patterns that did not appear to be sporadic (digging for termites, rather than using a stick to fish for them) classified as cultural.
The product also appears to be an effective pesticide against ants, fruit flies, weevils, locusts, and termites, and can also make wood more fire resistant, he added.
Or termites, says Stuart Smith, a 64-year-old from Zimbabwe.
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Dow AgroSciences has come up with a novel way to attack termites by introducing small amounts of chemical bait into the ground that termites ingest and take back to their colony, which is then destroyed.
The locals guided us on foot through the rainforest, pointing out the ants whose pinchers they use for stitches, the trees whose sap works like iodine and the termites that can be crushed into mosquito repellent.
Aside from being able to see straight through your BVDs, it can also be used to detect defects in spacecraft insulation, find termites lurking in the walls of your apartment, and help in the diagnosis of skin disease.
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He ran a spreadsheet and quickly figured out that if IBM made PCs based on the new Intel 386 chip, those powerful chips would begin eating like termites into IBM's expensive mid-range computers, which were enjoying absurdly fat margins.
In order to help protect close relatives, termites have been found to explode during fights, bees die after stinging, while the members of another species of ant have been found to condemn themselves to death by sealing in a nesting colony from the outside.
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"We all admire the beaver for the way it can turn a linear river into a lake with a dam, but the termites turning the desert into a pattern of oases that allow permanent life even in drought periods for hundreds of years - that's much more fascinating, " he told BBC News.
His early work in South Africa and Namibia studying termite mounds, prodigious natural chimneys of earth out of all proportion in size to the small termites that build them, did not turn him into a Darwin skeptic, by any means, but it did prod him to realize how important the role of environment is to the survival and flourishing of a species.
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