For home-owners, termites are a great threat – but for our natural environments, termites are critical to their survival. As decomposers – or more specifically, detritivores, termites clean up any dead plant material they find.
Without termites, forests would waste away and the ecosystem would fall apart.
While there are many other species of decomposers, termites are one of the main sources of wood decomposition and nutrient recycling – and they are not only incredibly busy and effective, but a small miracle of evolution!
Table of Contents
Definition: Are Termites actually Decomposers?
Termites are considered decomposers, since they eat dead plant material and turn it into useable nutrients.
However, there are two sub-groups of decomposers: Scavengers and Detritivores.
Scavengers specifically eat dead animals, like hyenas, wolves, or maggots. These carrion-feeders make sure that an environment doesn’t quickly turn into a pile of corpses.
Detritivores are decomposers that eat dead plant material, but the definition mainly includes arthropods: Insects with an exoskeleton rather than a spine.
Finally, there is one more distinction: Detritivores (and scavengers) perform the “first stage” of decomposition: Breaking down dead material into nutrients, but also leaving broken-down remains.
These remains can then be decomposed by bacteria, fungi, and other small-scale decomposers. While termites are able to eat an entire tree, these second-stage decomposition organisms can only break down “pre-digested” material since they absorb nutrients with external chemical and biological processes.
In short: Termites are first-stage decomposers who break down dead plant material such as dead tress, leaving behind only feces – termite frass – which can then be absorbed by second-stage decomposers such as fungi and bacteria in the soil.
Key Takeaways
- Termites are Decomposers – specifically, Detritivores
- Termites break down the cellulose in wood into glucose as a food source
- They also break down wood far enough for micro-organisms to further decompose the remains into basic elements
Without termites, these trees might never get recycled in nature.
The Termite’s important role in Nature
Decomposers are critical to any natural habitat, since they fill two roles:
1) Decomposers remove dead material, from dead plants to animal’s carcasses, and keep the environment clean.
2) They also “recycle” these dead remains by extracting nutrients from them, returning them back to the ecosystem.
Both of these tasks are crucial to the survival of a forest, and termites specifically are in charge of cleaning up dead trees, wood, and even leaves.
Without animals like termites, dead trees would keep lying around for decades, piling up and preventing the growth of new plants and trees.
In one study, they found that in the forests of Southern Guinea savanna of Nigeria, termites were responsible for cleaning up a total of 60% of all dead wood that piled up annually. Another major source of decomposition was the yearly bush fire – a much more dangerous way to get rid of dead (and living) material.
How termites clean up our forests
Termites, like all animals, need food to survive. Due to evolution, they evolved to form a symbiosis with a specific type of bacteria – protozoa – which lets them feed on wood.
Specifically, termites are able to break down the cellulose in the wood, turning it into glucose, a type of sugar that is one of the most important energy sources for many animals.
But in the grand scheme of things, termites (and other similar detritivores) do much more than that.
Decomposers break down complex plant material into basic elements through various chemical and biological processes. Water and carbon dioxide are the main outputs, but nitrogen, phosphorus, and calcium are also extracted in this process. (source)
All of these elements are critical for the growth of new plants, which explain how decomposition plays an important role in the nutrient cycle of forests and other environments.
So all the most basic resources (elements) that would be wasted in dead plants are recycled by termites (and second-stage decomposers breaking down a termite’s waste).
Without this process, we would not only have forests buried mile-high in dead trees, but all of a plant’s nutrients would be going to waste forever when it dies.
Since all resources are limited, life on our planet would not be possible without this process of constant resource/energy recycling. This cycle of nutrients is also called the Biogeochemical Cycle.
Termites, the future of green energy?
While termites cause billions of damage to home-owners every year just in the United States, they are critical in natural environments, as you now know.
But in recent years, researchers have tried to find ways to synthesize the superpower of termites to make a breakthrough in green energy.
The goal of the research is simple: Use lab-grown bacteria to break down plant material into cellulosic ethanol, which is a biofuel that could replace fossil fuels.
Being able to create biofuel from dead plant material would be a way to turn waste into energy sustainably, massively reducing the carbon dioxide output of traditional fuel sources.
More research is still necessary to fully understand the complexity of a termite’s gut and its diverse system of bacteria, but results so far are promising.
