Protect the castle (Image: Danita Delimont/ Gallo/Getty)
Humans have used drumming to relay messages across large distances for millennia – but they aren’t alone in this. It seems some species of termite do the same, by bashing their heads on the ground to signal danger.
The African termite (Macrotermes natalensis) builds giant mounds in the savannah on top of vast networks of tunnels that radiate to their foraging sites. Soldier termites protect the mounds and produce a drumming noise to alert their mound-mates of an approaching aardvark or pangolin.
To find out how they do this, Felix Hager and of the University of Bochum in Germany pointed high-speed cameras at the central chamber of a termite mound before opening it. The soldier termites responded by bashing their heads into the ground around 11 times per second, causing it to vibrate.
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Good vibrations
Next, they measured how far the vibrations from one termite travelled, and found that after 40 centimetres the ground no longer moved enough for other termites to pick up the signal. Yet termites that were much further away responded to the signal – workers, for instance, returned to the nest.
It turns out that when soldier termites pick up a drumming alarm, they respond by drumming their heads themselves. The wave of vibration travelled 1.3 metres per second.
The termites only respond to a specific frequency of vibrations. When the pair put individual termites into petri dishes and made them vibrate at different frequencies, they found the termites only stopped what they were doing and appeared to pay attention when the vibration patterns recorded in the wild were recreated.
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![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
