A research team led by National Chung Hsing University Department of Entomology associate professor Lee Hou-feng (李後鋒) was the first to name an undocumented termite species found in eastern Taiwan.
The discovery represented the last piece of the puzzle of termite taxonomy, Lee said yesterday, adding that he is part of a transnational team that includes members of the department, National Taiwan University, as well as foreign academics in the Czech Republic, Belgium and China.
Part of the Stylotermitidae family, the species is an intermediate between the Kalotermitidae and Rhinotermitidae families, he said.
Photo: Copy by Tsai Shu-yuan, Taipei Times
Once found worldwide, the Stylotermitidae can now only be found in Asia, he said, adding that scientific records on the species have been scarce since the 1980s.
The team has named it Stylotermes halumicus, Lee said, borrowing the word “halum” from the Bunun word for “pangolin.”
He said this was to thank the Bunun for their assistance in a pangolin conservation project hosted by National Pingtung University of Science and Technology.
The species was found in the trunk of a living tree in Taitung County’s Luanshan (鸞山) area, subverting the established notion that termites live in withered, dead trees or soil, he said.
Its unusual habitat might be why it was never documented in Taiwan over the past centuries, Lee said.
When the researchers collected the species in 2014, they assumed it was similar to the termites found in households, only bigger, team member and doctoral student Liang Wei-ren (梁維仁) said.
After examining its biological traits, the team learned that it is not one of the known termite species in Taiwan, he said.
Its evolution level is situated between the Kalotermitidae and Rhinotermitidae families, which vary widely in their respective habitats and impact on human life, he said.
Kalotermitidae often live in withered branches, with hundreds of termites in a colony; Rhinotermitidae live underground, with each colony housing up to 100,000 insects and can cause big economic losses if they are active in buildings, he said.
What happened between the two evolution stages is a long-term question for entomologists, to which their discovery might provide an answer and allow Taiwan to play a more important role in global termite research, he added.
The team’s findings have been published in the journals the Annals of the Entomological Society of America in 2017 and Invertebrate Systematics last year.
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