Termites eat wood.

That is their thing -- pretty  much their entire deal. So, if you were to guess which organism might be counted on to restore a plot  of destroyed rainforest, termites might not be the  first thing that comes up.

But what if an organism famous  for destroying wood is actually the thing that helps a baby  rainforest grow big and strong? It's a weird planet! And one group of Australian researchers say these little  wood-eating insects are probably exactly what's needed to  revitalize a wrecked rainforest. [♪INTRO] Rainforest restoration is  more complex than you'd think, partly because of a concept called succession.

The idea of ecological succession  assumes that biological communities replace each other  over time, and that each stage creates the conditions needed  for the next community to thrive. Conventional ecological wisdom  says that the process of succession eventually pauses once the community  has reached a climax stage – the forest's final form –  where it remains until there is a disturbance and the process  of succession starts over. So, even though it seems as if forest  restoration would be as easy as plunking down some baby trees and  waiting a few years to enjoy a little slice of "Fern Gully," the process  is actually a bit more like baking.

Just like a cake isn't just a pile  of flour, the successional stages of an ecosystem need a bunch of  ingredients to come together. Ingredients like species, temperature, and time. And termites have a place in the rainforest, too, but one that we need to understand.

Your cake needs baking powder to rise, but you definitely don't want  it to taste like baking powder. So, it's possible that the  wrong amount of it could make or break your cake. And the  same might go for termites.

That is to say, termites could make or break rainforest restoration, not a cake. A cake, they would definitely ruin. Anyway, an Australian research  group began to think about the part termites play in the succession  of rainforest communities.

Decomposers like termites  and mushrooms are vitally important to the health of a mature rainforest because they recycle carbon and  unlock nutrients like nitrogen from dead plants, allowing  them to be used by new ones. But generally speaking, a  rainforest rehab starting kit doesn't come with a little box of termites. The researchers wondered if or when, during the many-step succession process required to transform a piece of cleared  land into a mature rainforest, termites would wander back in to do their job.

So, they monitored two  different types of decomposers – termites and mushrooms – in Australian replanted forests in different successional stages. Based on similar experiments  in South America, they expected the termites to waddle back in on  their own, possibly even faster than the mushrooms started breaking  down old wood and leaf litter. But it turns out Australia  is built different, shocker.

The experiment involved placing  blocks of wood in restored rainforests of various ages, and they  returned regularly for four years to see how long it was taking the  wood blocks to decay, and whether the blocks had been discovered  by mushrooms, termites or both. The outcome was something of a surprise. Turns out the Australian termites  didn't spring into action like the team thought they  would, whereas the fungi got right back to work, and returned to their old growth forest decay rate very quickly.

And this is why you can go on Etsy and find hundreds of mushroom-themed stickers, t-shirts, and cross stitched pillows that say You Cannot Kill Me in a Way That Matters. With the termites, on the other hand,  it actually seemed to take longer. Although the experiment found that  they eventually straggled back into the reforested sites  to munch on the wood blocks, but they didn't show up in  great numbers or very quickly.

Which isn't all that  surprising, given that termite colonies in Australia can take 25 years to mature. The researchers suggested  they would eventually build a full head of steam in  terms of population size and biomass and get back to termite business as usual. But what it means for  rainforest restoration is that Australian forest regeneration  will probably have lower rates of termite-driven decay  than sites on other continents, which may mean carbon and nutrients  return to the soil more slowly.

The research team suggests that  maybe we need to be thinking about termite transplants from old-growth  rainforests into younger forests. Decomposers are necessary for nutrient cycling, and the faster that gets going, the better! Tropical rainforests are  important because they house around half of Earth's plant and animal species, drive weather patterns all over the globe, and act as the "lungs of the planet" by making a bunch of oxygen and cleaning the air.

They also act as carbon sinks, locking up huge amounts of  atmospheric carbon dioxide. In doing so, forests are essential  for regulating the global climate. Also, the plants in a forest  hold onto a bunch of nitrogen that needs to be unlocked by decomposers in order for it to be used by the  next generation of plants.

So, the part termites play  in the life and growth of a rainforest is very complex, and  in order to restore these forests, we need to understand a bit  more about their place in them. Unfortunately, we know so little about termites. We know they produce methane, a greenhouse gas we don't really want any more of, but also they might be locking up giant amounts of carbon in their nests.

So where they fall on the  climate-friendliness spectrum, we’re not totally sure. Plus some species have a special  relationship to nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which provide the type  of nitrogen plants need to grow. They’re also very tasty to a lot  of critters higher up the food web.

So, we really should get on understanding termites a bit better because it's possible  they would also lure other rainforest species like lizards and sugar gliders  back into the restoration site. The point is, rainforest restoration is hard. But at the end of the day,  sometimes building a rainforest requires adding in a little bit of something that's going to tear the rainforest down. [♪OUTRO]