A VIDEO has recently surfaced on Facebook showing bizarre footage of termites walking to death.
In the footage, viewers can see a ringlet of termites following each other in a circle.
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The termites, which seem to be inside of a fungus, do this until they die from exhaustion.
The clip, uploaded by Simon Jeffery, was shared on Facebook with the Australia & New Zealand Fungus Identification group.
Jeffrey captured the footage in Maleny in Queensland, Australia, around five years ago.
He told Live Science in an email that he was at a woodworking show when he filmed the occurrence.
“[They had] all different types of bark and all sorts of critters that break down the forest… It was a very cool stall,” Jeffery said.
He noted that he wasn’t sure if the stall owner added the termites to the fungus, per Live Science.
The phenomenon is the result of strong pheromones produced by termites.
These pheromones are released by termites so that others can find their way back to the nest.
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The practice is not uncommon among social insects and can be seen with ants as well.
While the pheromones are meant to guide lost termites back to their pack, sometimes they can result in death.
Take a look inside the creepy crawly world of a Termite nest
“In this video, they are engaged in a ‘death spiral,’ which is well documented in ants and a few termites,” Thomas Chouvenc, assistant professor of urban entomology at the Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center at the University of Florida, told Live Science.
“When a group of foraging social insects gets accidentally caught into a death spiral, they usually end up dying of exhaustion,” he added.
This is especially the case when traffic is heavier because the scent is more powerful and alluring.
“For termites, the physical contact of following a predecessor in the queue is often a simple way to organize good traffic flow,” Chouvenc said.
“Such lines are very common in termites, leading them from A to B. In the case of this video, that line made a loop because of the physical circle from the morphology of the fungi.”
It’s not clear when the first termite death spiral was observed, but an ant death spiral was first described in 1921 by American entomologist William Beebe.
Beebe observed a death spiral 1,200 feet in circumference and it reportedly took each ant two and a half hours to make one revolution.
