By Sharon Omahen
University of Georgia

Termites don’t worry about their own hygiene. But they are
fanatical about the cleanliness of fellow termites. This finding
could lead to another way of stopping these house-munching
menaces, says a University of Georgia specialist.

“Termites don’t clean themselves. They rely on each other and
spend a lot of time cleaning one another,” said Brian Forschler,
an entomologist with the UGA College of Agricultural and
Environmental Sciences.

Forschler and his graduate students recently uncovered this odd
behavior. He thinks it could be a step to a new termite control
that uses a mythical method of trickery.

Using termite habits against them

He envisions the “Trojan Termite.”

The idea is based on a story from the Trojan War. The Greeks
gave the Trojans a giant wooden horse as a peace offering, the
Trojan Horse. The Trojans happily accepted. They drug the gift
inside their fortified city of Troy. But Greek soldiers were
hiding inside its hollow belly. They crawled out and opened the
city gates. The rest of the Greek army stormed in and captured
the city.

Forschler is working on control tactics using this new
information.

“In this approach,” he said, “we want the one they will lick off
one another.”

Forschler has spent the past 15 years studying termite biology
to find better methods of controlling them.

Knowing genetics helps, too

Another tool in the battle against termites is genetics.

“We need to find out which ones are related to one another to
determine the makeup of a colony,” he said.

A simple way to do this is to put a few termites together in a
petri dish. “If they fight,” he said, “they are from different
groups, and they aren’t related.”

Forschler also uses DNA technology to determine the maternal
lineage of termites.

Like any human, a termite has an exact copy of its mother’s
mitochondrial DNA.

“With DNA, we do a ‘Who’s your Mama?’ type test,” he said.

These DNA tests have led Forschler to shy away from using the
word colony when he refers to termites.

Close-knit families

“When it comes to termites, there’s not a nice neat box where
there’s a king and queen and they all live together and do
termite things,” he said.

For the most part, termites prefer to hang out with their
siblings. But they will occasionally let other unrelated
termites into their society.

“It’s just like when we get married and we bring new people into
our family,” he said.

For now, he continues studying the tiny destroyers in the hopes
of finding new, more effective ways of controlling them.

“We have to keep telling ourselves that we’re way smarter than
they are,” he said. “I don’t think it will ever be so simple
that homeowners can go out and buy something and treat for
termites on their own.”

Americans spend more than $1 billion each year to repair termite
damage and hire control companies to treat infested
structures.