Older termites can explode yourself Bashny.Net

Termites are not kamikaze sdayutsya



What do the people after retirement? Travel around the world (if the pension and financial savings), devote time favorite hobby and raise grandchildren. At the same time, for instance, some termites, reaching a certain age, are not immersed in the quiet joy and insanity digging garden - nature considered that the most worthy of the finale of their life should be ... an explosion.

Employees of the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Czech Academy of Sciences found that working individuals termites Neocapritermes taracua, found in the tropics, French Guiana, are "packs" with a blue substance that enables them for example in the fight to destroy the enemy, however, at the cost of his own life. < br />


This amazing ability, researchers found that one of the "death row" blew himself up while trying to take it with tweezers. By studying a curious phenomenon, experts have come to the conclusion that when the workers Neocapritermes taracua «retire", the nature of which lays in the most genuine two-component chemical bomb. When you fight an enemy shell a kind of "suicide belt" bursts, and its "filling" of the protein containing crystals of copper reacts with the saliva of the insect, resulting in a paralytic poison.

Scientists found that the "bomb" appear only grown old working termites, termite caste of soldiers does not have such weapons - so that explosions are not so much to protect the colony, as to get rid of the "old men" did not do the job.

via factroom.ru