Hello! Hope you are thriving and ready for more TERMITES.

You know you were just direly in need of more cool critters. Well don’t you worry cos I GOT YOU.

This one is a tropical termite called Neocapritermes taracua and you find most of them on decaying wood which is their favourite thing to eat. Now, these bad bois use a slightly different strategy to us humans in terms of warfare.

We send our young men to war, termites send old ladies .

This was first spotted when researchers noticed that some of the termite workers had a pair of dark blue, elongated spots at the spot between their thorax and their abdomen.

Some workers didn’t have them, some had small ones, and some had very well developed ones.

When they looked a little bit closer they saw that these blue spots were actually blue copper-based crystal-like structures that were stored inside pouches. They’re made by crystal glands that sit on their abdomensand are genuinely referred to in scientific literature as " toxic backpacks".

These backpacks sit right next to salivary glands.

Sorry the picture isn’t so good (you"d think there would be higher demand for photos of old lady termites) but in A you can just about see the blue dots on the termite labelled bw (blue worker). The white worker (ww) is a young un so hasn’t grown her crystals yet. The one with the giant orange head is a soldier (s).

Scientists saw that older workers carried the largest and most toxic backpacks. Also as termites get older their mandibles get much less sharp. This is because they can’t moult their mandibles so the more munching they do, the duller the mandibles become. This makes them less good at foraging and maintaining the nest than some of the younger workers.

This means, when the nest is under attack, the old lady termites are sent off to defend the colony (whooooo you go Deborah!). When the enemy invaders bite on to that juicy thorax, it causes these big ol" pouches to burst and the crystals mix with the secretions made by the salivary glands. This makes a toxic blue liquidthat explodes out of the termite and covers the attacker.

B shows what the worker looks like after she’s exploded (the scientists grabbed her with tweezers) and C shows what the worker looks like when her crystals have been removed (and put next to her).

Of course this does also kill the termite, (cri) but this is not at all unusual. Self-destructive behaviour is pretty common among eusocial insects, because the workers don’t reproduce. This opens them up to all sorts of “altruistic” behaviours that benefit the colony as a whole rather than the individual.

In fact, defensive suicidal rupturing (yes that is a real scientific term) has evolved independently in a whole bunch of different termite and ant species. This tells us that it’s a pretty good strategy as evolution goes.

ALSO you gotta remember that this is kind of a brilliant system. As you get old and a bit shit and unable to care for the colony — you can be BAD ASS instead and explode blue goop over your enemies and kill them.

So getting old isn’t all bad.

Lots of love to you,

Flora xxx