Elad’s blog

The ant is ready when its third rear becomes bright green. You’re supposed to bite and spit this third, and then eat the rest of the ant, which is full of sugar and hence is very sweet.

I didn’t eat it yet. I did, though, watched them pretty carefully today at my visit to Litchfield Park. Most visitors to this park go directly to the waterfalls and swim at the pools created by them (very nice, large pools surrounded by high walls; pretty resembling some scenery of the Golan). I, however, was more impressed by the insects: the ants, and mainly the termites.

Termites are close relatives to ants. In order to solve the problem of floods, they decided to build their nests above the ground, thus creating huge mounds - Litchfield is packed with them. I spotted three distinct types, probably there are more.

First there are those that build mounds around living trees. They use the tree both as mechanical skeleton and as food - the trees usually get eaten from the inside, creating big hollow logs (actually, this is the traditional way to build a didgeridoo: you find in the forest a branch that is long and thick enough, and that was eaten by termites so it is now hollow. You then put some beewax at one end, so it is smooth and gentle for the lips; and that’s it - your didg is ready. Of course, you can paint the outside, but this is hardly necessary. The abundance of didges shows how widespread these termites are.).

More impressive is the second type of termites - the Cathedral Termites. They build huge mounds, that can exceed 6 meters in height (And a few meters in circumference), and resemble medieval european architecture. The mounds, that are baked by the sun, become as rigid as a sandstone, and actually help the termites to adjust to climatic changes (wet vs. dry season) as well as to the extreme day-night temperature differences.

The third type, the Magnetic Termites, are the most sophisticated. Their mounds do not have the basic circular structure like their Cathedral relatives; they rather have a plate-like mound with a distinct axis. The nice part is that all the axes are alligned north-south with a precision of around 10 degrees - an excellent natural compass, if you ever need to navigate at northern australia.

The explanation to this wierd behavior, I think, lies in the sun. The mound is used to collect the sun heat; at the early morning you can (presumably, I missed the show) see all the termites gathering at the eastern wall of their mound to warm out, than around noon they flee the heat into the center of their mound. Very sophisticated indeed.

Besides Litchfield I went yesterday to the excellent sunday market at Mindil Beach. I really enjoyed the street shows there, and even bought a cd of didge music from a perfect band that gave a street show there. I listened to it today on the way to Litchfield, and really liked it - if you’re into world-music, it is recommended. I met there and Israeli who plans to go to Papua, so I gave him some tips; later I went to the second fringe show, which was less impressive than the one I saw the day before.

Again, I got the girl’s name wrong. I wander if this is sign of something. The third try is Elinor, and she will join me tommorow - I hope to get it straight, as it becomes embarassing. Besides her, Tony will also join, and I gave him yesterday all the info he needs to add himself to my insurance, so he can also drive with me tommorow into Kakadu park.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 8th, 2005 at 10:18 and is filed under Travels, Australia Center and South. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.