“While we have been trying to save the world’s crumbling pre-urban ecosystem, we have been ignoring the fact that nature has already been putting up the scaffolds to build novel, urban ecosystems for the future.”
Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town (2018)
More than half of the world’s population now resides in cities. But cities are far from inert human monuments. As Barua (2023) puts it, they are “vibrant collectives teeming with multispecies liveliness”. Whether it’s a sapling emerging from a cement road or a flock of pigeons in a traffic roundabout, cities are witnessing the transformation of non-human elements and their dynamics with the ecology surrounding them. Among them is a resilient creature found in the cracks of the concrete jungle that emerges undefeated, time and again, like a phoenix from the ashes. The one I’ve come to dread and admire: the termite.
Termites are bad news. Wherever they appear, they herald destruction and loss. Feeding mostly on wood and paper, they are a household’s nightmare, infamous for ruining shelves, farms, and paperwork, essentially anything that contains cellulose. A 2005 report estimated global termite-related losses at US$50 billion annually (Korb, 2007). But this reputation is only a part of the story. My own encounter with termites began in a modest PG1 room in northern Delhi.
Along with the bright red Gulmohar, the dawn of spring in Delhi saw the coming in of tiny termite houses in the crevices of our room wall. Fast forward to June, they had become a “nuisance”, with the cleaning staff having given up, from trying everything – from scraping their build-ups manually to spraying strong, pungent, anti-termite sprays. In my half-serious analogy, the termites have become the colonizers of pre-independent India, staking claim to the wooden shelves, annexing the bed box, and waging silent campaigns deep into the wardrobes. As a last resort, the staff says there will be a dedicated week of continued spraying of an even stronger spray when the girls have left for their homes during the summer break.
However, despite varying and repeated attempts, the termites seem to be winning. So much so that it prompted me to embark on a journalistic journey to highlight their resilience, something lesser talked about in the media.
Tracing Termite Timelines
Long before they invaded wardrobes in Delhi, termites were scuttling beneath dinosaurs and were among the earliest social insects on earth (Korb, 2007). Evolving from a “social cockroach,” they now form complex colonies led by a queen and king, with armies of workers and soldiers delaying their own development to sustain the nest.
Being either wood-dwellers or foragers, their division of labour can be surprisingly flexible. In wood-dwelling termites, so-called “false workers” may stay in the nest to one day inherit it as breeders, a strategy more opportunistic than altruistic. In contrast, foraging termites with “true workers” show early developmental splits into soldier, worker, or reproductive paths, emphasizing classic kin-directed altruism (ibid).
Their disrepute, however, is the work of just a few bad apple species, when the majority are the quiet dwellers of the dark, playing a pivotal role in ecosystems. They process dead plant material, turning tough cellulose into fertile humus with the help of diverse gut symbionts. In tropical regions, they can constitute up to 95% of the soil insect biomass, profoundly shaping soil structure, nutrient cycling, and water flow. Their towering mounds (sometimes over eight meters tall!) regulate temperature and provide habitats; even after abandonment, they host new life, sometimes anchoring entire forest patches in the savanna (ibid).
Darwin Comes to Delhi
When it comes to the organic fabric of the city, Schilthuizen (2018) shows in myriad ways how urban ecosystems assemble themselves and might, one day, be the chief form of nature on our urbanized planet. Be it house sparrows and house finches in Mexico City incorporating cigarette butts into their nests (the nicotine wards off mites!) or the grove snail in Dutch cities evolving toward lighter coloration to better survive the urban heat, the ecologist pounds home the idea that cities are crucibles of evolution, driving rapid adaptations.
The termites fit right in. Their evolution in urban settings, as they encounter synthetic materials, thrive in the microclimates of concrete buildings, and possibly develop resistance to common pesticides, falls in line with Schilthuizen’s rationalization.
In this light, termites and urban dwellers aren’t just uneasy cohabitants; they’re locked in a co-evolutionary arms race, each side continually refining its strategies (Dawkins & Krebs, 1979). As humans deploy new chemical defenses, termites work on immunity. Natural selection thus fine-tunes both pests and pest control in real time.
Hence, the termites’ very presence suggests that our cities are laboratories where new strategies of living are constantly emerging. Although it’s tempting to view them simply as the enemy, something unsettling is revealed in how easily our vision of the city slips into a demand for total control. The termites remind us, although somewhat rudely, that cities are porous, imperfect, never fully under human dominion. They refuse to be passive acceptors. They are agentive improvisers in our carefully managed domesticities, powerful enough to strike down real estate value!
Postscript from the PG: Painted, Purged… (for now)
It’s mid-July as I conclude this blog. The room has been vacated, a termite termination operation carried out, repainted, and declared termite-free. But perhaps, in their hidden tunnels, they are already regrouping and reworking their secret blueprints.
In that sense, they become unlikely teachers. About resilience. About the folly of imagining the urban as purely human. About how, to borrow from Barua (2023) again, cities are never settled matters. They are throbbing, contested, lively worlds, right down to the tiniest social insects orchestrating empires behind our wardrobes.
Acknowledgements This blog would not have seen the light of day if not for Prof Suresh Babu. Along with his constant support and encouragement, Merlyn’s inputs were indispensable in reaching the blog’s capacity. I would also like to thank Mohana Saha and Nirjesh Gautam for being encouragers and critics of my work. I’m deeply grateful and extend my sincere thanks to everyone involved.
References
Barua, M. (2023). Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology. University of Minnesota Press.
Dawkins, R., & Krebs, J. R. (1979). Arms races between and within species. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences, 205(1161), 489–511. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1979.0081
Korb, J. (2007). Termites. Current Biology, 17(23), R995–R999. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.10.033
Schilthuizen, M. (2018). Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution. Picador.
Thorne, B. L. (1997). Evolution Of Eusociality In Termites. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 28(1), 27–54. doi:10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.28.1.27.
- A Paying Guest (PG) accommodation is when a person stays in someone else’s house/property and pays rent for the accommodation and facilities available with it. A PG provides communal spaces, food, and housekeeping for all residents ↩︎