When the first termites emerged more than 200 million years ago, dinosaurs were just starting their long domination of the earth and human beings were no more than a glimmer in the eye of some distant ancestor. The first termites had already developed the basic social bonds and behaviors that their colonies possess today. Formosan termites appeared perhaps 100 million years later. They refined the basic termite society into a ferocious weapon capable of deploying millions of hungry individuals across wide areas of forest. This gives termites awesome powers and ecological impacts which other insects do not have.
Termites have extraordinary powers of foraging, feeding, reproduction and defense.
In most land habitats, the total mass of social insects exceeds that of all the area's vertabrates combined. The weight of the Formosans in the single, record-setting colony that infested the Algiers Regional Public Library may have exceeded 600 pounds. Most people think of evolution as a series of upgrades leading to bigger brains and more elegant physiques. Many scientists believe that termites made a series of evolutionary trade-offs to survive in a harsh environment. Over tens of millions of years, they grew bigger, better, more flexible colonies by tightening the reins on individuals.