Termites: A Pacific and Working World

Book adapted and updated by Professor Kaba Kourouma, University lecturer, in memory of his father Karamoko KOUROUMA. According to specialists in animal sociology, termites are the social insects that have reached the highest degree of organization. But when zoologists give us the identity card of these tiny bugs, a 10th grade student who approaches during the year the study of invertebrates literally gets caught in the hierarchy of values. Lets listen to the zoologist: A termite is a coelomate triploblast metazoan, of the phylum Arthropoda, subphylum Mandibulata or Antennata, class Insecta, subclass Pterrygota, section Neoptera, super-order Blattopteroida, order Isoptera. In the case of invertebrates, it would be easy to find a termite. But there are termites and termites. Today, there are more than a thousand species of termites divided into at least twenty genera. And it depends on what they eat. This can be dry wood, wet wood or rotten wood.