termites, hemimetabolous diploid white ants白蚁,hemimetabolous二倍体白蚂蚁.pdfVIP

Frontiers in Zoology BioMed Central Review Open Access Termites, hemimetabolous diploid white ants? Judith Korb1,2 Address: 1Biologie I, University of Regensburg, D-93040 Regensburg, Germany and 2Behavioral Biology, University of Osnabrück, D-D-49076 Osnabrück, Germany Email: Judith Korb - judith.korb@biologie.uni-osnabrueck.de Published: 29 September 2008 Received: 26 March 2008 Accepted: 29 September 2008 Frontiers in Zoology 2008, 5:15 doi:10.1186/1742-9994-5-15 This article is available from: /content/5/1/15 © 2008 Korb; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Ants and termites are the most abundant animals on earth. Their ecological success is attributed to their social life. They live in colonies consisting of few reproducing individuals, while the large majority of colony members (workers/soldiers) forego reproduction at least temporarilly. Despite their apparent resemblance in social organisation, both groups evolved social life independently. Termites are basically social cockroaches, while ants evolved from predatory wasps. In this review, I will concentrate on termites with an ancestral life type, the wood-dwelling termites, to compare them with ants. Their different ancestries provided both groups wi