Termites of Delhi continued

Dec 26, 2015 • 7:55 AM UTC

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Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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A couple days ago; I shared a quick video of tutorial from a 5 year old (my nephew) on not only how to use a Foldscope; but also catching some exciting samples. We ended up collecting some termites.
See the previous post here . https://microcosmos.foldscope.com/?p=11116
I collected termites for many reasons. One of them is to explore the fascinating fauna of what’s swimming inside the gut of a termite. That’s something I still did not get a chance to fully uncover (more on that will come soon – since I am convincing my 5 year old nephew to go collect more termites for me); and have him collect the data I want.
But I did image the basic anatomy of a termite. Some fascinating structures including incredibly large “jaw muscles” for obvious reasons – chewing wood. It’s quit a site to watch them eat wood, or for that matter – your entire house.
I decided to talk in Hindi since I was explaining (real time – no guarantees it’s correct) what I saw; since my grand parents were also watching the same. I also trained my ~80 year old grand parents how to use a foldscope – they had a blast. More on that will follow again – but let’s first just enjoy the termites.

Watch out for the beautiful antenna, almost non-existent eyes, muscular jaws, and strange ptterns on the guy epithelium. These “white ants” of India are form a remarkable ecosystem around them – which is what I will try to expose with the help of my 5 year old friend.
If you know what species this is – please do let me know via comments. If you can narrow down a little bit – that would be a start.
Cheers
Manu