While the key role of termites in the decomposition of litter in the tropics has been acknowledged for a long time, much less information exists on their importance in the recycling of dung of primary consumers, especially herbivores. A review of published studies shows that a diverse group of termites (at least 126 species) has been reported to feed on a wide range of mammalian dung (18 species). Predominantly, wood-feeding and polyphagous wood-litter feeding species were found to feed also frequently on dung. Moreover, we found that termites can quickly remove large amounts of mammalian dung, especially in the dry season, when on average about 1/3 of the dung deposited in a given habitat is removed by termites within one month (with the highest rates observed in savannas). No distinctive preference for mammalian dung over other organic food sources was observed for fungus-growing termites (Macrotermitinae), whereas the majority of the non-fungus growing taxa studied prefer dung over other food. As termites bring large quantities of dung below the soil surface, disturb and enrich soils with nutrients, dung feeding by termites appears to be a previously underestimated process important in the functioning of tropical ecosystems.

This work evaluated the functional response of adult females of Eriopis connexa to different densities of Macrosiphum euphorbiae and Tetranychus evansi. When preying upon aphids, E. connexa presented a sigmoidal functional response (Type III). This behavior, however, changed drastically to an exponential (Type II) functional response, when mites (T. evansi), rather than aphids, were offered to E. connexa. Such different patterns showed that this coccinellid needed to adopt distinct strategies according to the kind of prey available. Since predators were believed to be able to regulate prey populations only when adopting Type III functional response. E. connexa would be a good candidate for a biological control agent of M. euphorbiae, but would not suppress a growing population of T. evansi.

Animal movements have been related to optimal foraging strategies where self-similar trajectories are central. Most of the experimental studies done so far have focused mainly on fitting statistical models to data in order to test for movement patterns described by power-laws. Here we show by analyzing over half a million movement displacements that isolated termite workers actually exhibit a range of very interesting dynamical properties –including Lévy flights– in their exploratory behaviour. Going beyond the current trend of statistical model fitting alone, our study analyses anomalous diffusion and structure functions to estimate values of the scaling exponents describing displacement statistics. We evince the fractal nature of the movement patterns and show how the scaling exponents describing termite space exploration intriguingly comply with mathematical relations found in the physics of transport phenomena. By doing this, we rescue a rich variety of physical and biological phenomenology that can be potentially important and meaningful for the study of complex animal behavior and, in particular, for the study of how patterns of exploratory behaviour of individual social insects may impact not only their feeding demands but also nestmate encounter patterns and, hence, their dynamics at the social scale.

How do termite inquilines manage to cohabit termitaria along with the termite builder species? With this in mind, we analysed one of the several strategies that inquilines could use to circumvent conflicts with their hosts, namely, the use of distinct diets. We inspected overlapping patterns for the diets of several cohabiting Neotropical termite species, as inferred from carbon and nitrogen isotopic signatures for termite individuals. Cohabitant communities from distinct termitaria presented overlapping diet spaces, indicating that they exploited similar diets at the regional scale. When such communities were split into their components, full diet segregation could be observed between builders and inquilines, at regional (environment-wide) and local (termitarium) scales. Additionally, diet segregation among inquilines themselves was also observed in the vast majority of inspected termitaria. Inquiline species distribution among termitaria was not random. Environmental-wide diet similarity, coupled with local diet segregation and deterministic inquiline distribution, could denounce interactions for feeding resources. However, inquilines and builders not sharing the same termitarium, and thus not subject to potential conflicts, still exhibited distinct diets. Moreover, the areas of the builder’s diet space and that of its inquilines did not correlate negatively. Accordingly, the diet areas of builders which hosted inquilines were in average as large as the areas of builders hosting no inquilines. Such results indicate the possibility that dietary partitioning by these cohabiting termites was not majorly driven by current interactive constraints. Rather, it seems to be a result of traits previously fixed in the evolutionary past of cohabitants.