Termites play a key ecological role in many tropical and subtropical ecosystems. By building and maintaining their nests and mounds, they substantially affect bioturbation levels, soil properties, and nutrient distribution. Their mounds represent a unique type of microhabitat, maintaining specific conditions not only for termites but also for other potential inhabitants. Once these mounds are abandoned by their original builders, they potentially serve as a suitable microhabitat for various arthropod taxa. This study revealed a high diversity and abundance of arthropods—especially ants—in unoccupied mounds of soil-feeding Dicuspiditermes spp. termites, in both primary and logged forests in Borneo.
A field study was conducted in the Maliau Basin Conservation Area and the Kalabakan Forest Reserve (run by the SAFE Project) in Sabah, Borneo, by a team led by Tom Fayle and Jiri Tuma from Queen Mary University of London and the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic. In their previous studies, they found up to five times higher concentrations of basic soil nutrients in the Dicuspiditermes mounds compared to adjacent soil, while another study estimated that there is in mean 200 unoccupied mounds per hectare on the primary forest floor. In this study, they took samples of unoccupied (abandoned) mounds of a common Dicuspiditermes termite species and compared them with the same volume of adjacent soil. They counted and identified all the animals visible to the naked eye.
Dr. Tuma said, “These soil-feeding termites build very apparent mounds, sometimes found at high densities when one walks through the forest in Borneo, but there is surprisingly limited knowledge about their ecological interactions. Despite the number of studies that have shown high diversity of termitophiles, especially in large African or Australian termite mounds, these soil-feeding termites have received much less attention, and we had no information about the situation after the mound is abandoned.”
In this study, the team found that unoccupied mounds had five to nine times higher invertebrate abundance than control soil. While the pattern was similar in both primary and logged forests, logged forests had an overall lower abundance of soil invertebrates. However, most of the observed difference was driven by ants, which comprised 79% of all fauna in the mounds, representing 17 species. This suggests that the mounds serve as potentially important nesting microhabitats for ants, including some species with poorly described nesting habits. While mounds contained a total of 17 ant colonies, the control samples had only one.
Dr. Fayle said: “The significance of these unoccupied mounds for microhabitat provisioning is probably much higher than we thought. Using previous estimates of mound densities, we estimate that unoccupied Dicuspiditermes spp. mounds support more than 340,000 invertebrate individuals per hectare in primary forest, and more than 17,000 individuals per hectare in logged forest. So, similarly to well-recognized microhabitats like dead wood, termite mounds should be considered equally important for providing microhabitats for various soil and litter fauna—especially in areas where they are abundant, such as lowland tropical rainforests.”

DOI：10.1007/s42832-025-0329-8