An assistant professor in the Auburn University Department of Entomology & Plant Pathology recently found evidence that termites living millions of years ago mated the same way termites do today, according to the Auburn University newsroom.
Nobuaki Mizumoto was part of an international team of researchers who found the evidence in a 38-million-year-old piece of fossilized amber, the only known fossil of a pair of Electrotermes affinis termites.
Fossils holding more than one specimen provide rare direct evidence of behavioral interactions among extinct organisms, and the findings from this particular fossil were recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a leading, peer-reviewed scientific journal.
“Amber provides one of the most detailed and vivid records of extinct life,” Mizumoto said in a news release. “However, the process of fossilization may distort the true picture of past organisms and bias evidence.”
In this case, the termites, one male and one female, in the Baltic amber inclusion show a head-to-abdomen contact that resembles the courtship behavior of termites today called the “tandem run.” During this mating behavior, the insects display coordinated movements to ensure they stay together while exploring a new nest site, according to the Auburn University newsroom.
However, one of the extinct termites is turned parallel to its partner: a variable from how this behavior is seen today.
Mizumoto and his colleagues theorized that when the termites were fossilized — in this case, encased in sticky tree resin — their positions may have shifted because the process was not instantaneous.
To test their hypothesis that the forces during amber formation can explain the shift in position, Mizumoto and his colleagues simulated this process in the lab.
The experiment on mating termites showed that even if the leading termite got trapped on a sticky surface, the follower would not abandon its partner but walk around them — resulting in a position very similar to the pair immortalized in amber.
According to the to the Auburn University newsroom, the finding is significant because it demonstrates that past behavioral interactions can be reconstructed despite the spatial distortion of body poses during fossilization.
Read more about the discovery here.