Termites scamper about on the rainforest floor in Borneo. (Credit: corlaffra/shutterstock) Termites are minuscule scourges to homeowners, but the wood-chomping critters are also masterful engineers. And now an international team of researchers has found that these construction skills actually help protect tropical rainforests from drought. The insects have an outsized impact on forest soils by helping control moisture in the dirt, a critical component to forest health that climate change and human impacts increasingly threaten. The results also suggest termites could buffer tropical rainforests from drought in the future. “We previously thought termites were important in tropical rainforests, but we didn’t know how important, particularly during drought,” said Louise Ashton, an ecologist at the University of Hong Kong, who led the new work.
Termites abound in tropical rainforests. And while Ashton and her colleagues suspected the insects impact the typically lush ecosystems, scientific circles give the bugs little attention (with ...
