Treading carefully Sebastian Oberst/University of Technology Sydney

It pays to tread lightly. Termites have evolved super-soft footsteps and sharp hearing to evade their noisy enemies.

Ants are major predators of termites, but they often fail to notice that hungry termites are foraging for food just millimetres away.

This is because termites can tiptoe around, says Sebastian Oberst at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. His team has shown that termite footsteps are up to 100 times quieter than those of ants.


Termites are blind, but their hearing is finely tuned to detect the stomping of ant feet, says Oberst. This allows them to keep track of their enemy’s location and dodge them if they get too close.

To test this ability, the researchers placed termites in boxes with multiple chambers separated by wood partitions. The termites burrowed through the partitions into adjacent chambers if they were empty or contained dead ants. But they avoided chambers that contained live ants as well as empty chambers that were playing audio recordings of ant footsteps.

In addition, the termites reinforced the wooden partitions with clay if they could hear ants pacing around in the adjacent chamber.

The findings suggest that termites detect ants via footstep vibrations rather than chemical signals, because ant pheromones cannot penetrate through the wooden partitions. “Pheromones don’t travel as far as vibrations, so it makes sense for termites to detect vibrations,” says Nathan Lo at the University of Sydney, Australia, who was not involved in the study.

Raising the alarm

The researchers also found that termites seem to imitate the sound of ant footsteps when they are under threat. They bang their heads or shake their bodies to produce similar vibration patterns. “We think this alarm signal has evolved to mimic the walking signal of ants,” says Oberst.

Termite footsteps are not all the same, either. Macrognathotermes sunteri, for example, has the softest footfall – so soft that can go undetected by other termites and is known to steal food.

Oberst is now hoping to use the findings to improve pest control. One possibility is to play the sound of ant footsteps to flush termites out, he says.

Lo agrees that the idea is feasible. “You might be able to rig up a vibration system to the structural timber inside a house,” he says. “If you could then mimic the vibrations of an ant species that is known to eat the offending termites, you might be able to deter them.”

This would remove the need for toxic chemicals, but the effect may be short-lived, says Lo: “I have the feeling they might wise up to it fairly quickly. Termites are pretty clever when they’re hungry.”

Journal reference: Ecology Letters, DOI: 10.1111/ele.12727

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