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A so-called "cathedral" mound produced by a termite colony. Structures built by non-human animals, often called animal architecture, [1] are common in many species. Examples of animal structures include termite mounds, ant hills, wasp and beehives, burrow complexes, beaver dams, elaborate nests of birds, and webs of spiders.
Some of the mounds are 3 m (10 ft) tall and 10 m (33 ft) wide, and they are spaced about 20 m (66 ft) apart. Underneath the mounds are networks of tunnels that required the excavation of 10 cubic kilometres (2.4 cu mi) of dirt. Scientists performed radioactive dating on 11 mounds. The youngest mound was 690 years old.
Some effigy mounds were constructed in the shapes or outlines of culturally significant animals. The most famous effigy mound, Serpent Mound in southern Ohio, ranges from 1 foot (0.30 m) to just over 3 feet (0.91 m) tall, 20 feet (6.1 m) wide, more than 1,330 feet (410 m) long, and shaped as an undulating serpent .
The infraorder name Isoptera is derived from the Greek words iso (equal) and ptera (winged), which refers to the nearly equal size of the fore and hind wings. [15] " Termite" derives from the Latin and Late Latin word termes ("woodworm, white ant"), altered by the influence of Latin terere ("to rub, wear, erode") from the earlier word tarmes.
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Geophagia (/ ˌ dʒ iː ə ˈ f eɪ dʒ (i) ə /), also known as geophagy (/ dʒ i ˈ ɒ f ə dʒ i /), [1] is the intentional [2] practice of consuming earth or soil-like substances such as clay, chalk, or termite mounds. It is a behavioural adaptation that occurs in many non-human animals and has been documented in more than 100 primate ...
Common sites include vertical or horizontal faces of walls, cliffs, bridges, overhangs and shelter caves or other structures. Mud nest of an unidentified mud dauber in Bhopal, India The nest of a black and yellow mud dauber species Sceliphron caementarium is a simple, one, two or sometimes three celled, cigar-shaped mass that is attached to ...
The earliest mounds are 'conical'; they are essentially bumps of earth - the simplest and arguably the most intuitive kind of burial. Successive conicals likely evolved into linear mounds. Bird mounds likely came next as modifying a linear mound to make a bird mound required only the addition of a head and a tail.