Termites are incredibly fascinating organisms. Thousands of years ago, humans called termites “white ants,” presumably because they were thought to be a type of ant. Today, we know that termites are not ants and, in fact, are not even evolutionarilyrelated to ants. Rather, termites evolved from wood-feeding cockroaches in the genus Cryptocercus. You might be thinking to yourself “but termites are eusocial superorganisms, with overlapping generations, cooperative brood care and reproductive division of labor just like ants!” Ifyou were having this thought, you were absolutely correct! Ants and termites are both eusocial insects that share a lot of characteristics, but their similarities are due to homoplasy rather than homology. Homology is a similarity between species due tocommon ancestry, while homoplasy is a similarity between species that occurred independently. A good example of homoplasy would be a shark and a killer whale. They are both aquatic predators with fins, but a killer whale is a mammal while a shark is a fish. Think of termites and ants in similar terms.
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