媲美古埃及的宏伟白蚁国度
古埃及人在玩刺客信条造金字塔的差不多时候，有一群迷你的劳工同时也在南半球的巴西地区建造宏伟的“金字塔”。白蚁建造的白蚁蚁丘保存到现在跨越了4000多年，并且其大到足够可以让人从太空中观察到这些蚁丘。
The roughly 4,000-year-old termite mounds — there are about 200 million of them — are so immense that each has nearly 1,800 cubic feet (50 cubic meters) of soil in it. Taken together, these termites have excavated more than 2.4 cubic miles (10 cubic kilometers) of earth, which is equivalent to the volume of about 4,000 Great Pyramids of Giza, the researchers said.
这些蚁丘中包含的白蚁数量大约有2亿只这么多，每个蚁丘大约使用了50m³的土来搭建，这促使白蚁们不辞辛苦的挖了超过10立方公里的土地，这些土壤堆积起来相当于4000座吉萨大金字塔的体积。
In other words, this is the "greatest known example of ecosystem engineering by a single insect species," the researchers wrote in the study.
换句话说，这是“已知最著名的单一昆虫种群所进行的生态系统工程。”研究人员在研究中写道。
The termite-crafted mounds in northeastern Brazil span an area about the size of Great Britain, the researchers said. But these mounds — measuring about 8 feet (2.5 meters) tall, with a diameter of about 30 feet (9 m) — aren't nests, the researchers said. Over thousands of years, termites (Syntermes dirus) excavated dirt as they made an extensive, interconnected tunnel system underground. Then, they dumped the dug-up soil aboveground, leading to the mounds.
研究人员说，这些白蚁丘在现巴西东北部地区，面积差不多和大不列颠岛差不多大。这些高越2.5米，直径约9米的蚁丘并不是我们下意识所认为的白蚁巢穴。而是由白蚁们几年前来用他们的口器将泥土挖掘到地面从而形成一个非常广泛的、互相连接的地下隧道系统，但这个隧道并没有什么内部结构。而被挖掘到地面的泥土则堆积形成了我们所看到的地面上的白蚁丘。
"These mounds were formed by a single termite species that excavated a massive network of tunnels to allow them to access dead leaves to eat safely and directly from the forest floor," Stephen Martin, the chair of social entomology at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.
英国索尔福德大学社会昆虫学系主任斯蒂芬·马丁在一个州说：“白蚁挖掘这些隧道的目的是为了能够安全便捷的进入森林地表获取所需的枯枝败叶等食物。”
The mounds were hidden by Brazil's thorny-scrub caatinga forests, a semiarid landscape covered by deciduous trees for years. Members of the public, including scientists, began to discover them only over the past few decades as the land was cleared for pasture.
随着近年来在巴西卡廷加森林的开垦运动的进行，这些被掩盖的白蚁丘才被发现并逐步进入科学家和民众们的视野。
To learn more about the mounds, the scientists collected soil samples from the centers of 11 of them. The results showed that the mounds were filled between 3,820 and 690 years ago, making them about the same age as the world's oldest-known termite mounds in Africa.
为了进一步了解这些土丘，科学家们从白蚁国度中的11个蚁丘上采集了图样样本。分析结果显示这些土壤大约在3820到690年前辈白蚁挖到蚁丘上，这证实了他们和非洲现存最古老的非洲白蚁丘差不多年纪。
The researchers also investigated the mounds' spacing, which resembles the "mima mounds" of Washington state — mysterious lumps that may have been made by plants, although some scientists think that gophers are the culprits. The termites' mounds also resemble South African "heuweltjies" and Namibian fairy circles, the researchers noted.
通过对每个蚁丘之间间距的调查分析，研究人员发现这些蚁丘类似于美国华盛顿州的“Mima”土堆，后者是一种在Mima草原上发现的仍无法解释的奇特地质构造，有很多地质学家猜测是三地鼠建造了“Mima”土堆。同时巴西的白蚁王国还很像南非的“heuweltjies”和纳米比亚发现的“仙女环”，前者也是土堆而后者则是不长植被的小型圆形集合。
Given the tunnels system's complexity, it's likely that a pheromone map helps guide the termites through the underground maze, the researchers said. The giant network also gives the termites a safe route to a sporadic food supply, a similarity also seen in naked mole rat tunnels, the researchers said.
研究人员说，考虑到这个地下隧道网络的复杂性，研究人员认为白蚁应该是靠信息素来导航的，这种巨大的隧道网络给每一个白蚁都提供了前往分散的觅食点的安全通道，和裸鼹鼠的隧道具有相似性。
"It's incredible that, in this day and age, you can find an 'unknown' biological wonder of this sheer size and age still existing, with the occupants still present," Martin said.
马丁说：“值得一提的是，在已经高度发达的现代社会能够发现这种生物奇迹已是幸运之外，在这个古老而又庞大的白蚁国度中，他的居民们仍然传承生活在其中。。”
