Insect guts present distinctive environments for microbial colonization, and bacteria in the
gut potentially provide many beneficial services to their hosts. Insects display a wide range …

Termites are a clade of eusocial wood-feeding roaches with> 3000 described species.
Eusociality emerged~ 150 million years ago in the ancestor of modern termites, which, since …

Termites have colonized many habitats and are among the most abundant animals in
tropical ecosystems, which they modify considerably through their actions. The timing of their …

High-throughput DNA sequencing has the potential to accelerate species discovery if it is
able to recognize evolutionary entities from sequence data that are comparable to species …

Understanding the origin and diversification of organisms requires a good phylogenetic
estimate of their age and diversification rates. This estimate can be difficult to obtain when …

Lignocellulose—the dry matter of plants, or “plant biomass”—digestion is of increasing
interest in organismal metabolism research, specifically the conversion of biomass into …

Like ants, termites are entirely eusocial and have profound ecological significance in the
tropics. Following upon recent studies reporting more than a quarter of all known fossil …

Hamilton's rule is a central theorem of inclusive fitness (kin selection) theory and predicts
that social behaviour evolves under specific combinations of relatedness, benefit and cost …

Obligate eusociality with distinct caste phenotypes has evolved from strictly monogamous
sub-social ancestors in ants, some bees, some wasps and some termites. This implies that …

Termites are fully social insects, with an extraordinary range of morphological forms. It is
now clearly established that they are a very specialised form of cockroach, with far more …