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Science
Related: About this forumTermites 'engineer fairy circles'
A German scientist thinks he can now explain the strange rings of grass that cover great swathes of desert-margin land in southwestern Africa.
These so-called fairy circles have variously been pinned on the presence of other, poisonous plants, on ants, and even toxic gases rising from below.
But Norbert Juergens says the one ever-present factor is sand termites.
The creatures have engineered the rings to maintain a supply of water in their environment, he tells Science magazine.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21970408
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Termites 'engineer fairy circles' (Original Post)
dipsydoodle
Mar 2013
OP
In_The_Wind
(72,300 posts)1. Very cool!
dipsydoodle
(42,239 posts)2. I bet the clever little rascals couldn't do this
caseymoz
(5,763 posts)3. They're also taking over New Orleans
. . . and will probably manage it better than human beings ever did.
BainsBane
(53,041 posts)4. they covered this on All Things Considered
On Sunday. Interesting.
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)5. Concerning the theory at the end of the article:
It can't be a phenomenon of the plants in general: If the pattern were a collective build-up of a behavior of individual plants, seeking to establish a preferred distance to neighbors, those rings would have melded into a hex-pattern (because hexagons can cover a 2-dimensional surface with a minimum of edges/closest neighbors) over the course of generations.