What If Gone

Species → African Fungus-Growing Termite

African Fungus-Growing Termite

Macrotermes michaelseni

No global population figure. Colony densities measured in savanna:…
Extinction risk Not Evaluated
SavannaEcosystem engineerSoil
African Fungus-Growing Termite (Macrotermes michaelseni)
Photo: Andrew Deacon, Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

What if it disappeared?

Impact Moderate
Abundance and biomass, Kenya

Without this regular — rather than random — spacing of mounds across the landscape, the abundance, biomass, and reproduction of consumers at every trophic level, from insects to large herbivores, would be markedly lower.

Documented
Detail

Pringle, R.M., Doak, D.F., Brody, A.K., Jocqué, R. & Palmer, T.M. (2010). Spatial Pattern Enhances Ecosystem Functioning in an African Savanna. PLoS Biology, 8(5), e1000377.

By comparing the real, regular arrangement of mounds to simulations where the same resources would be randomly distributed, the authors isolate the effect of the spatial pattern itself — an emergent behavior of termite colonies that mutually avoid one another — rather than that of the resources they produce alone.

Climate robustness, Kenya

Without termite mounds regularly spaced across the landscape, vegetation would collapse more abruptly as rainfall declines: their presence today makes the arid ecosystem markedly more resilient to water shortage than models of vegetation on homogeneous soil would predict, rather than being a warning sign of desertification.

Documented
Detail

Bonachela, J.A., Pringle, R.M., Sheffer, E., Coverdale, T.C., Guyton, J.A., Caylor, K.K., Levin, S.A. & Tarnita, C.E. (2015). Termite mounds can increase the robustness of dryland ecosystems to climatic change. Science, 347(6222), 651–655.

Termite foraging galleries extend up to 70 m around the mound and form a network of macropores that promotes water infiltration into the soil. The mounds become fertility islands that concentrate nearly all the local woody vegetation. The authors' model, confirmed by field data from Kenya, shows that this heterogeneity delays vegetation collapse under increasingly dry conditions, rather than being an early warning of it.

By extrapolation

Bonachela et al.'s model predicts that an arid landscape stripped of termite mounds would shift more abruptly into a degraded state as rainfall declines — but no field experiment has removed termites from an entire landscape to test this prediction.

Extrapolated
Detail

Extrapolation à partir du volet modélisé de Bonachela et al. 2015, qui compare des paysages avec et sans monticules en simulation plutôt que par retrait expérimental réel.

Unlike the exclusion experiments conducted on large herbivores (see the acacia ant entry) or the direct removal of the long-spined sea urchin, no study has removed termites from an entire arid landscape to directly observe the shift the model predicts.

What's missing to confirm it: A field experiment actually removing termites from an area (rather than comparing landscapes that already do or don't have mounds) would confirm the model's prediction rather than inferring it from a simulation.

Documentation

Last verified: August 14, 2026