they can eat wood, which includes cellulose, lignin and other matter that animal guts normally can’t digest. I’ll return to this. Second, they are highly social and gain great economies from division of labour among specialists. A termite mound has many of the attributes of a single large and voracious organism, with its own anatomy, its own physiology and its own mud-fashioned organs, including an ingenious ventilation and cooling system. The mound itself stays in one place, but it has a myriad mouths and six myriad legs, and these range over a foraging area the size of a football pitch.
