Termites!

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We’re going to listen to every homeowner’s nightmare. Termites. Today, on Engineering Works.

Anybody who’s ever owned a house has horror stories about termites in their house or someone else’s. A single termite colony can be home to 200,000 termites, sometimes as many as 2,000,000. In the southern United States, they’re a big problem. We spend at least $2,000,000 a year to prevent termites from attacking our homes, or controlling them once they’re in.

You’ve probably never wondered how termites decide which piece of wood they’re going to have for lunch. Neither did we. But some engineers and scientists in Australia did wonder. And they think they’ve figured it out. It has to do with what wood sounds like to termites as they chomp into it.

Termites chewing sets up vibrations in the piece of wood they’re eating. Big pieces produce lower sounds than small pieces. And termites seem to like higher pitched chewing sounds better than lower-pitched ones. You can fool the hungry insects into avoiding the smaller pieces of wood they prefer by feeding recorded big-wood vibrations into the smaller pieces.

All this does have a point. The researchers think that knowing how these vibrations affect what termites do could be a start toward understanding how to prevent some termite infestations. And maybe get in the way of the way they reproduce, so they end up with fewer of the hungry pests.

Hmm! That sounds like termite vibrations now. We’ll talk to you later.

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