My world there are only 12

The humidity isn’t just important to the termites . The termites make a living farming a fungus (Termitomyces) on structures known as fungus cones. The fungus helps breakdown dead plant and woody material into more digestible and nutritious food for the termites, and they in turn help maintain the environment for the fungus. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement.

    The mound is like a physiological extension of the termites themselves: a giant lung

There’s a lot of hustle and bustle in the termite nest, and both the fungi and the termites produce a lot of carbon dioxide. The problem, says Hunter King, a postdoctoral student at Harvard University, is that eventually they need to get rid of it.

Though there has been previous research investigating how carbon dioxide is swapped for oxygen in the mound, King says that in those studies, nobody measured the flows directly.

That’s why King, along with colleague Samuel Ocko from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and supervisor Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan from Harvard University designed a study that would allow them to directly measure temperature, carbon dioxide and humidity in the mounds of Odontotermes obesus termites.

Turns out, it’s tricky to take gas measurements within a termite mound.

It’s a lot of work to build a mound, and so naturally, termites go to great lengths to make sure it has solid defences. It’s that defence system – like a state of the art burglar alarm &ndash Beauty Box; that makes measurements inside so difficult to take.