European subterranean termite
Reticulitermes lucifugus
— Where the name comes from
Lucifugus is the word that says everything: “light-fleeing”, from lux and fugere. This termite never comes into the open — when it has to cross a wall it builds a tunnel of earth and saliva ahead of itself and walks inside that. Reticulitermes sets reticulum, the little net, before termes: the wing veins of the reproductive individuals form a close mesh.
— Facts
- Group
- Insects · Insecta
- Order
- Cockroaches and termites
- Habitat
- Dead wood, beams, stumps; galleries in the soil
- Range
- Southern Europe, from Spain to the Balkans
- Size
- Workers 4–6 mm; the winged forms slightly longer
- Diet
- Wood cellulose, digested by symbiotic protozoa
- Lifespan
- The colony decades; individuals 2–5 years
— Characteristics
- 01
It does not digest wood itself: the protozoa in its gut do.
- 02
The workers are blind and without pigment.
- 03
It eats from the heart of the beam outwards, leaving the surface intact.
— What sets it apart
The damage becomes visible when it is complete. Eating from within and leaving the surface film of the wood intact, a colony can hollow out a load-bearing beam without anything showing from outside: it is discovered when a foot goes through the floor. In Italy it is the species responsible for most of the damage to historic town centres, and in Venice, where wood is everywhere, it is a structural problem. The young are fed mouth to mouth precisely because the protozoa that digest cellulose are not inherited: they must be passed from one individual to another at every moult, or the colony would starve in front of a whole beam.
