She must be fed and her gargantuan maggot-like body cleaned by a legion of workers, allowing her to spend every bit of her energy squeezing out a fresh egg every three or so seconds, all day every day, for up to twenty years. At over twenty thousand eggs a day, she’s capable, in theory, of producing some 146 million termites in her lifetime, making her the most reproductively successful terrestrial animal on the planet.
