KalahariLog

One of the first things we noticed walking around town were the termite hills. Gaborone for the most part looks like a small town that could be anywhere but unlike all the other places I've been before, there are termite hills popping out everywhere, on the side of the road, in the backyard, inside the house of one of Tanya's friends. We do have termites in Tucson too but they seem to be the less conspicuous type: ours prefer the quiet life inside the woodwork of a local house. The most you see from them is a tunnel going along a wall or one of those stalagmites, or a hanging tunnel from the ceiling. There used to be a good one at Old Peking, the Chinese restaurant where our department had weekly lunches. Which remind me that these weekly lunches went on to be monthly lunches last year and from the emails I get, they seem to be semesterly lunches now. I kind of miss the lunches and Old Peking. The string beans they made there were often quite good, if one didn't mind the dead cockroaches under the spinning bit of the table.

Back to termites. While many termite hills are freestanding affairs, many others start by surrounding a living tree. After stripping the back, the tree eventually dies, but it still provides the scaffolding for a nice big structure. A month or so after we moved in we noticed that several of the trees in our yard were not getting any leaves. A closer examination showed that they were being taken over by termites! For a few weeks we battled the buggers with a hose (just washing down their tunnels and constructions). This proved largely ineffective as in a day or two they'd rebuild what we had washed away. Eventually, we found out that there is a chemical sold under the catchy name "blue death" that is used here to treat the soil around the tree under attack. With the help of blue death we saved two out of the three trees under attack. Sadly, the third one is only good for firewood now.

Still, I can't help but be impressed by the termites, their constructions, and their hard work (much in contrast with other more familiar life-forms). One of the incredible features of the termite hills is thermoregulation. Some of the termites need constant (or near constant temperature) for growing fungal plantations and they achieve that by quite complex internal architecture and by opening and closing holes in strategic places. According to many of the papers that have been written about this, some of best architects can achieve a temperature within +1/-1 degree Celsius! After several 40C days and 30C nights, living without air conditioning is starting to wear thin on us. I would seriously consider trading our current flat for a low-tech pile of dirt, so long as it comes with thermoregulation. I am not sure if our local termites here control their climate as well as the best of them but their lumpy mounds have very intricate internal structure, indeed.

Termites here are the main source of food for many species, among then the hard-to-see aardvark and aardwolf. Initially, we had hopes of seeing the first animal in any alphabetical list of animals but even some of the guides we've talked to say that they've never seen one. In fact, there are a few superstitions associated with seeing aardvarks. It is believed that seeing an aardvark is a sign that somebody close to you is going to die. People eat termites too. We've seen children poking the termite mounds with sticks just like the baboons do. On the way to the shopping mall there are a few termite hills and we often see people who are walking along stop by for a quick wriggly snack. At least after this snack there is no packaging to toss along the side of the road. Apparently, the termites taste "spicy".