A macrotermite queen takes things even further. She is enormous. Her torso is the length of a fingernail but her abdomen is a palm-sized, pulsating, egg-laying sac, so grossly distended that she cannot move. She also has a distinct lack of gut microbes. Instead, she relies on her worker daughters (and their microbes) to feed her. Her entire colony – thousands of workers, billions of microbes, and giant nests laced with wood-breaking fungus – functions as her gut.23
