What is the nature of your work with termites?

My present work focuses on how important termites, as well as other soil creatures such as earthworms and ants are in maintaining the actual health of our northern tropical environments by recycling nutrients, revitalising the soil, providing important food sources. All the animals running around in the soil play a really important role in keeping the soils healthy. And if the soils are healthy, that’s a good start for the environment to be in a healthy state.

How do you catch termites – with small tweezers?

We do! That’s one of the easiest, or least difficult, ways to collect termites. Unlike a lot of other insects, termites are very difficult to sample in the environment. For such creepy crawlies as ants, for example, we bury plastic jars in the soil with the lids off, and put the preservative agent in the bottom. The ants just run along the surface and drop into these vials – a really easy way of catching them. For grasshoppers we sweep nets like big butterfly nets through the grass, collecting spiders at the same time.

But termites are really difficult, because they live in a variety of habitats: in mounds, in dead wood, under the soil. So you need a variety of techniques to sample them in the environment. For example, we do open up mounds and I pick the termites out with the tweezers; I get an axe, break open any dead wood on the ground and pick them out with tweezers. And we use a range of baits, putting wooden stakes and even toilet rolls (which they love) on the ground for them to feed on.

An offer too good to refuse: attracting termites into degraded landscapes

I understand there is an exciting possibility of using termites to rehabilitate land. How might that work?

One aspect of my research at the moment is looking at whether we can use termites as a management tool, to kick-start the restoration process in degraded landscapes like disused mine sites, or very bare areas that have been so severely overgrazed that when the cattle are removed, the system can’t bounce back – even with sufficient rainfall and no grazing, the system is still in a degraded state. You have hard soils, there’s no grass, the trees are gone, the area is in quite an unhealthy state. So the idea is to try and introduce termites into that landscape to start increasing its health.

But because it’s really hard to physically go out and collect termites and dump them into a landscape, we have to attract them there by using their food resources. There is quite a range of feeding strategies amongst the termites. Most people think of them as wood feeders, but we also have termites that feed on grass, on litter or on soil, and the idea is that we put patches of attractive food resources down in the bare, degraded landscape. I am using straw to try and attract grass-feeding termites, and bits of wood to attract wood-feeding termites.

Termites that are attracted in to start feeding on all that dead plant material – the straw and the wood – help to recycle the energy and nutrients that are locked up in it: unless something comes along and breaks it down, those nutrients remain inaccessible to the rest of the system. And as the termites start burrowing and creating tunnels through the soil and setting up nests, that starts aerating the soil, a bit like earthworms in your garden at home breaking up the soil and reconditioning it. Then, because the nutrients are cycling through and the termites are creating lots of holes in the soil, water can get into the soil more easily, rather than running off the surface, and a much more attractive environment is created for plants to start growing. And if the plants start growing, that attracts other insects in. So we have a flowthrough effect, from the termites conditioning the environment and improving its health, up through the food chain. You get other insects moving in and then lizards come in, and birds and so forth.

Have you actually set up some test sites to work on this?

Yes. For a year now I have been setting up some really basic test sites, the first in Australia for this type of work. (A couple of preliminary studies have been done on the African savanna systems, which have a lot of similarities with the Australian ones.) And I’ve found already that termites are actually moving into the areas where the food resources have been put out, so it’s looking good.

Vital steps toward a sustainable Australia

Would you say that ecosystems research is an important component in developing a sustainable Australia?

Yes, particularly in the north. In northern Australia we are lucky that many of our landscapes are quite pristine or at least in very good condition compared with southern Australia, so it is a golden opportunity for us to understand how these ecosystems work. Such an understanding is essential if we want to come up with management practices that can utilise that land in a sustainable way. In southern Australia it is obvious, from the level of degradation and the salinity that we see, that a lot of mistakes have been made. If we’d understood beforehand a bit more about how these ecosystems work, it might have helped us to improve and maintain the sustainability of these systems. In the north, where the land is in much better condition, we’ve still got that chance.

But the challenge for us is to tell people the significance of our research, when often people want instant results. We can’t come up with appropriate land management practices unless we know how the system works to start with.

In my case, I need to know how all the creatures in the soil are helping keep the environment healthy. We know in general that termites and ants and earthworms are important for a healthy environment, but we don’t know whether the termites help in one particular way, perhaps as a food source, the earthworms in another way, perhaps in keeping the soil healthy, and the ants in a different way again. They all may help in slightly different ways, but we don’t know yet. We need to understand the particular contributions of all those little creatures in the soil, and how they work together to keep the environment healthy, before we can go on to understand how cattle grazing or any other disturbances – fire, for example – may affect groups of termites or earthworms or ants and how the whole system is affected. And then, hopefully, we can come up with ways to keep those landscapes sustainable and to conserve the biodiversity – the diversity of insects, birds, spiders, animals in general, and plants – in that system.

Focus questions

• Do you agree with Dawes-Gromadzki in thinking that healthy soils are essential for a healthy environment?

• How would you describe a ‘sustainable environment’?