Families of land animals are separated by hundreds of kilometers of oceans. Explanations for how they got so far away from each other are as varied as the animals themselves.
Animals have hitched rides with humans around the world, on our vehicles, food products, and on our bodies.
The continents were connected hundreds of millions of years ago, and animals were able to walk across the land.
There has been a lot of floating and hoping for the best.
According to a new study, the drywood termite family has successfully crossed the ocean at least 40 times in the last 50 million years.
Although you might think they could fly by air, they are lousy at flying over long distances, so they are better suited crossing vast stretches of water via a different form of transport.
The lead author of the study is an evolutionary geneticist from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.
Their homes are made of wood so they can act as tiny ships.
The Krakatau islands are highlighted by the researchers. The area was left desolate by a volcanic eruption in 1883, but multiple species of drywood were able to reestablish themselves after 100 years.
The dispersal ability of Kalotermitidae stems from their lifestyle, as they usually nest in and feed on single pieces of wood, which can float across oceans as rafts, according to the team.
Most Kalotermitidae are unable to find food outside of their wood piece. They make colonies in wood items like dead branches.
The team did not set up drywood termites on little boats and let them set sail to work this out. They looked at the genetics of the drywood family Kalotermitidae and how their genes traveled around the world.
Almost all of the different genera of the Kalotermitidae were represented by the researchers, who focused on around 120 species of the termite, representing 27 percent of the diversity.
There is a map of the world. The article is titled (Buček et al., MBE,22).
wood termites are thought of as primitive because they split from other termites around 100 million years ago, and because they appear to form smaller colonies.
The earliest common ancestor lived 84 million years ago. Some of the early splits in the family tree may have happened over land before Gondwana broke up.
Most of the splits happened less than 50 million years ago, which suggests that these little land-hoppers were traveling across the sea. Human voyages may have helped the termites.
The analysis suggests that we have been too harsh on these little guys. The Kalotermitidae nest in small groups on a single piece of wood, which many researchers believe is the original way that the termites lived.
The single-piece-of-wood strategy could be a new adaptation, according to the researchers, as some of the oldest lineages in the genetic family foraged on multiple wood pieces.
Tom Bourguignon, an OIST ecologist, says that the study only shows how little we know about termites, their lifestyles, and the scale of their social lives.
As more information is gathered about their behavior and ecology, we will be able to use this family tree to find out more about the evolution of sociality in insects.
The research has been published.
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