The highlight of my visit was watching chimps using sticks to extract termites from termite mounds.
Professor Weaver worked to develop safe pesticides and wood preservatives, which he used to keep termites from totem poles in British Columbia and from historic buildings in Puerto Rico.
More confusingly, it has grown harder -- especially since Mr. Farber retired from film criticism in the mid-70's -- to tell the termites from the elephants.
In contrast to traditional pesticides, which create a poison barrier around a building, baits contain wood laced with a low-toxicity pesticide that prevents the termites from shedding their exoskeleton during molting, essentially strangling them in their own skin.
The insecticide prevented the termites from making chitin, the main component of their exoskeletons.
Windows is just a coat of paint, vital to keep the cracks from forming and the termites from digging in, but not a place from which we daydream.
Entomologist Kenji Matsuura of Okayama University in Japan and colleagues first collected termites from 30 colonies at five different sites.
FB was isolated directly from the stipe tissue and served as the inoculum for laboratory-reared termite colonies, from which the fungus was reisolated by obtaining single conidia from guts of worker termites from the colonies and was confirmed to be FB.
This setup helped to spatially demarcate one substrate from the other as well as to keep the distance travelled by the termites from the nest to the pit almost equal.
Termites from the Rhinotermitidae family, however, are avoided due to their chemical defenses.
