媲美古埃及的宏偉白蟻國度

Around the same time the ancient Egyptians were building their mighty pyramids, tiny termites were digging through the earth, creating giant mounds in Brazil that still exist today and are so massive, they're visible from space, according to a new study.

古埃及人在玩刺客信條造金字塔的差不多時候，有一群迷你的勞工同時也在南半球的巴西地區(qū)建造宏偉的“金字塔”。白蟻建造的白蟻蟻丘保存到現(xiàn)在跨越了4000多年，并且其大到足夠可以讓人從太空中觀察到這些蟻丘。

The roughly 4,000-year-old termite mounds — there are about 200 million of them — are so immense that each has nearly 1,800 cubic feet (50 cubic meters) of soil in it. Taken together, these termites have excavated more than 2.4 cubic miles (10 cubic kilometers) of earth, which is equivalent to the volume of about 4,000 Great Pyramids of Giza, the researchers said.

這些蟻丘中包含的白蟻數(shù)量大約有2億只這么多，每個蟻丘大約使用了50m³的土來搭建，這促使白蟻們不辭辛苦的挖了超過10立方公里的土地，這些土壤堆積起來相當于4000座吉薩大金字塔的體積。

In other words, this is the "greatest known example of ecosystem engineering by a single insect species," the researchers wrote in the study.

換句話說，這是“已知最著名的單一昆蟲種群所進行的生態(tài)系統(tǒng)工程。”研究人員在研究中寫道。

The termite-crafted mounds in northeastern Brazil span an area about the size of Great Britain, the researchers said. But these mounds — measuring about 8 feet (2.5 meters) tall, with a diameter of about 30 feet (9 m) — aren't nests, the researchers said. Over thousands of years, termites (Syntermes dirus) excavated dirt as they made an extensive, interconnected tunnel system underground. Then, they dumped the dug-up soil aboveground, leading to the mounds.

研究人員說，這些白蟻丘在現(xiàn)巴西東北部地區(qū)，面積差不多和大不列顛島差不多大。這些高越2.5米，直徑約9米的蟻丘并不是我們下意識所認為的白蟻巢穴。而是由白蟻們幾年前來用他們的口器將泥土挖掘到地面從而形成一個非常廣泛的、互相連接的地下隧道系統(tǒng)，但這個隧道并沒有什么內(nèi)部結(jié)構(gòu)。而被挖掘到地面的泥土則堆積形成了我們所看到的地面上的白蟻丘。

"These mounds were formed by a single termite species that excavated a massive network of tunnels to allow them to access dead leaves to eat safely and directly from the forest floor," Stephen Martin, the chair of social entomology at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.

英國索爾福德大學社會昆蟲學系主任斯蒂芬·馬丁在一個州說：“白蟻挖掘這些隧道的目的是為了能夠安全便捷的進入森林地表獲取所需的枯枝敗葉等食物。”

The mounds were hidden by Brazil's thorny-scrub caatinga forests, a semiarid landscape covered by deciduous trees for years. Members of the public, including scientists, began to discover them only over the past few decades as the land was cleared for pasture.

隨著近年來在巴西卡廷加森林的開墾運動的進行，這些被掩蓋的白蟻丘才被發(fā)現(xiàn)并逐步進入科學家和民眾們的視野。

To learn more about the mounds, the scientists collected soil samples from the centers of 11 of them. The results showed that the mounds were filled between 3,820 and 690 years ago, making them about the same age as the world's oldest-known termite mounds in Africa.

為了進一步了解這些土丘，科學家們從白蟻國度中的11個蟻丘上采集了圖樣樣本。分析結(jié)果顯示這些土壤大約在3820到690年前輩白蟻挖到蟻丘上，這證實了他們和非洲現(xiàn)存最古老的非洲白蟻丘差不多年紀。

The researchers also investigated the mounds' spacing, which resembles the "mima mounds" of Washington state — mysterious lumps that may have been made by plants, although some scientists think that gophers are the culprits. The termites' mounds also resemble South African "heuweltjies" and Namibian fairy circles, the researchers noted.

通過對每個蟻丘之間間距的調(diào)查分析，研究人員發(fā)現(xiàn)這些蟻丘類似于美國華盛頓州的“Mima”土堆，后者是一種在Mima草原上發(fā)現(xiàn)的仍無法解釋的奇特地質(zhì)構(gòu)造，有很多地質(zhì)學家猜測是三地鼠建造了“Mima”土堆。同時巴西的白蟻王國還很像南非的“heuweltjies”和納米比亞發(fā)現(xiàn)的“仙女環(huán)”，前者也是土堆而后者則是不長植被的小型圓形集合。

Given the tunnels system's complexity, it's likely that a pheromone map helps guide the termites through the underground maze, the researchers said. The giant network also gives the termites a safe route to a sporadic food supply, a similarity also seen in naked mole rat tunnels, the researchers said.

研究人員說，考慮到這個地下隧道網(wǎng)絡(luò)的復(fù)雜性，研究人員認為白蟻應(yīng)該是靠信息素來導(dǎo)航的，這種巨大的隧道網(wǎng)絡(luò)給每一個白蟻都提供了前往分散的覓食點的安全通道，和裸鼴鼠的隧道具有相似性。

"It's incredible that, in this day and age, you can find an 'unknown' biological wonder of this sheer size and age still existing, with the occupants still present," Martin said.

馬丁說：“值得一提的是，在已經(jīng)高度發(fā)達的現(xiàn)代社會能夠發(fā)現(xiàn)這種生物奇跡已是幸運之外，在這個古老而又龐大的白蟻國度中，他的居民們?nèi)匀粋鞒猩钤谄渲小！?rdquo;