Beyond soldiers: Defensive roles of workers in Neotropical Syntermitinae termites
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14295/bjs.v6i4.967Keywords:
defence, termite behaviour, worker caste, nest repair, SyntermitinaeAbstract
Termite defence is often described through soldier morphology and secretions, yet colony protection also depends on workers that detect, confront, isolate and repair threats. This review examined the evidence for worker defensive participation in Neotropical Syntermitinae, with emphasis on behavioural, structural and alarm-related functions. A structured public-source literature search was conducted on 25 August 2026 across scholarly web indexing, PubMed, SciELO, Scopus, Web of Science, publisher pages, biological archives, institutional repositories, taxonomic catalogues and backward-forward citation chasing. Searches combined current and historical taxonomic names with terms for workers, defence, aggression, alarm, nest repair, and termite-termite interactions. After eligibility screening, taxonomic harmonisation, duplicate and derivative-report removal, and source verification, 41 curated records were evaluated and 11 independent primary sources directly documented worker participation in defensive contexts. The evidence covered 14 current species in eight genera, but was strongly concentrated in Cornitermes cumulans and Brazilian systems. Workers acted as an agonistic caste in nestmate and heterospecific encounters, participated in collective alate protection, contributed to alarm-associated responses, and built or restored barriers after nest damage or competitive tunnel contact. Recent studies on worker head and salivary glands in C. cumulans add a mechanistic context, but do not yet demonstrate a defensive chemical function. A single global meta-analysis was not defensible because the available studies reported incompatible response units, including instantaneous aggression counts, survival functions, repair time, binary observations, and qualitative field accounts. The synthesis therefore supports a broader view of Syntermitinae defence in which soldiers remain specialised, but workers provide essential tactical and structural functions. Future experiments should quantify worker-only and worker-soldier responses with shared outcomes, colony-level replication, and openly available summary data.
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