The 200 million mounds make up the size of Great Britain, scientists say, with each 2.5 metres tall and nine metres wide. They were uncovered by deforestation in the northeast of the country, with the total area covered measuring almost 89,000 square miles. Scientists outlined their findings in the journal Current Biology, and revealed the mounds, which are still in use by the insects, are so huge they can easily be seen using Google Earth.
Co-author Roy Funch, of Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana in Brazil, described it as “the world’s most extensive bioengineering effort by a single insect species,” says co-author Roy Funch of Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana in Brazil”.
Speaking to Cosmos magazine, he added: “Perhaps most exciting of all, the mounds are extremely old — up to 4000 years, similar to the ages of the pyramids.”
Termites, from the genus Orthognathotermes, have excavated roughly 10 cubic kilometres of soil in order to dig “a network of interconnected underground tunnels”, and depositing the soil above ground, Mr Funch explained.
He said the mounds had been discovered on the “coating” forests, where vast numbers of trees had been cut down to make way for arable land.
As a result, they came to the notice of the scientific community.
Researchers had believe the “strangely regular” patten of the mounds might have been a result of competition between different termite colonies.
However, after undertaking behavioural tests, they could find “little aggression at the mound level”.
Now they have concluded the pattern is the result of “self-organisational processes”.
Co-author Stephen Martin of the University of Salford in the UK said: “It’s incredible that, in this day and age, you can find an ‘unknown’ biological wonder of this sheer size and age still existing, with the occupants still present.”
Termite colonies can range in size from 60,000 to one million individuals, meaning the total number of insects in the network numbers many billion.
A typical termite colony will have just two capable of reproducing: the king and the queen.
Both produce pheromones, signalling nesting and mating, which spread throughout the colony and prevent worker termites from becoming reproductive adults.
The queen starts starting the colony and lays all the eggs until the it reaches a certain size.
She will then permit some of immature termites to develop into secondary queens which can additional eggs needed to grow the colony.
Both the king and queen can live between 15 and 25 years.
Each colony consists of several different “castes” including the Queen, the workers, who constitute the largest group in a colony, the soldiers and the reproducers, who fly off after reaching maturity to start new colonies.