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One of the largest and strangest engineering structures on the planet is almost totally hidden from the world, unless you know where to look.
Buried in the vegetation of Caatinga in northeastern Brazil, scientists have revealed the true magnitude of a vast set of 200 million termite mounds covering an area the size of Britain.
What is amazing about this huge complex of scattered land – apart from its huge volume, estimated at 10 cubic kilometers (2.4 cubic miles) of soil – is that few people seem to really know it.
Biologist Roy Funch of the Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana in Brazil first noticed the mysterious mounds of the early 1980s, rarely or never seen by "strangers" before clearing was done. reveals the strange stacks of the last decades.
"Some locals think that they were formed by termites, ants or a similar creature," Funch told ScienceAlert.
"But for many, they were just there – natural formations, created by God, that had always existed – because the difficult area of livestock breeding and small plots did not leave much time for speculation. "
At the time, Funch was writing about them for a popular science magazine in Brazil, but over the decades, no scientist has ever reported their existence.
To remedy this oversight, Funch published an article on mounds in 2015, but it is only as part of new research that the entire extent of this huge mound has been exposed.
In 2015, Funch estimated that there were about 90 million mounds, about 900 large pyramids of Giza, and that this structure was "arguably the most beautiful example of insect biopedoturbation and ecosystem-based engineering. at the scale of the landscape ever recorded ".
Since then, the estimate has only been revised upward. New investigations by Funch and his research colleagues suggest that there are about 200 million mounds representing about 4,000 large pyramids in volume and dating back about 4,000 years.
Such a giant footprint means that you can easily see the array of space via the wonders of satellite imagery: note the visible mounds in both cleared areas and contrasting garrigue on Google Earth.
"In terms of scale, termite mounds are about the size of the Great Barrier Reef – a feat of bioengineering involving many species," says Funch.[whereas] the mounds on which we report are built by a single species of termite ".
This termite species is Synterms dirus. But how did these mounds – which are about 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) tall and reach 9 meters (29.5 feet) wide – got there, and how S. dirus to prepare them to be dispersed so uniformly in the landscape of Caatinga?
According to the team, which analyzed the structures from the air and down to the ground, the 200 million heaps represent soil displaced from a massive network of underground tunnels, which allows termites to easily reach the surface. to access their food source: fallen leaves.
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"There is no big plan, like flocks of birds, as long as they stay at a constant distance from their neighbor, the whole flock of thousands of people is flowing in an orderly fashion", said the first author and social entomologist Stephen Martin of the University of Salford in the UK told ScienceAlert.
"Because of falling leaves (food) once a year, you need an effective system to get as much food as possible before you die."
Soil samples taken from some of the mounds reveal that they were filled 690 to 3820 years ago, making them about as old as the oldest known termite mound in Africa.
Yet, despite its remarkable age and size, it seems that thousands of years of work, excavations and termite excavations have been completely ignored by humans who have not noticed it because of Caatinga's clogging scrub.
Unless you are a curious and determined scientist, that is with a convenient access to an eye in the sky.
"The scale is incredible," says Martin. "People do not believe in scale, it's so big … it's really mind-blowing."
The results are reported in cellular biology.
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