(Inside Science) -- The appetites of social termites extend to cannibalizing their co-workers after death. It's done for the greater good of the community.
“Termites have a lot of strategies to keep the nest and the members of the colony clean,” said Luiza Helena Bueno da Silva, a zoology graduate student at São Paulo State University in Brazil and the lead author of a study published recently in Zoology.
Asian subterranean termites are invasive pests in many parts of the tropical world. They eat through wooden structures from the inside out. Their complex social webs are made up of three castes: workers, soldiers and reproducers.
They live underground, which makes disposing of their dead a problem -- cadavers can be a source of fungal or bacterial diseases that can wipe out an entire colony.
Da Silva and her colleagues collected termites and put them into a container in the laboratory, ...
