A few years ago, pest manager Eddie Pearce was called out to a quarry in Gordonvale, Australia. On the site is an old office building that had long been in disuse — that is, by people, anyway.
Nothing could
prepare Pearce for what he saw when he walked inside.
In the corner of the room, standing from floor to ceiling, was an enormous termite mound.
“I mean, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Pearce told The Dodo.
Pearce estimates that the mound had been built up slowly as a termite home over the course of more than a decade.
“The building had been let go for I'm not quite sure how long,” Pearce said. “There was literally no timber left in the wooden part of the steel structure.”
The mound stands about 10 feet tall, extending past the ceiling into the space above. And life stirred within.
“It’s still active,” Pearce said.
Rather than try to eliminate the termites and their epic construction, it was ultimately decided to simply let them be.
“No one’s done anything with it,” Pearce said. “[The owners] weren’t worried about it, because they weren’t using the office anymore. They didn’t have any real concerns at all.”
The building has since been fenced off, signaling a concession, perhaps, that it’s now strictly for termites.
Out in the Australian bushland, termites build impressive homes of their own, too.
"Such structures are common in natural areas where one of these mound-building species is present and has been part of the Australian and African folklore," Dr. Thomas Chouvenc, an associate professor of urban entomology at the University of Florida, told The Dodo. "Such species build these nests to expand their colony size and reuse soil, fecal material, saliva, and other available material as building blocks for their above-ground foraging galleries and above-ground nesting structure."
As for the mound Pearce found?
"It appears quite fantastical. Yet termites just do their thing, regardless of human construction. From their perspective, it is just part of the landscape," Chouvenc said.
Being in his line of work, Pearce is no stranger to the damage that can be caused by those wood-eating insects. But he can’t help but appreciate their tenacity.
“I totally respect termites,” Pearce said. “Because if you let them go, there's literally nothing they can't do.”
