Most of the methane (about 1,000 millions tons a year) is made by micro-organisms in the mud in wetlands, lakes and sea beds, and termites and ants produce most of the rest, with cows coming next (damn, now we're back to Terry's limerick!). In the growth-decay cycle, something like two-thirds of the world's biomass goes through ants and termites.
It's not ludicrous, Michael, it's an interesting question. I'll try to dig up some more info. I've got a GREAT book on termites half scanned, a real work of genius (for our Small Farms Library). But the writer wasn't an energy freak, not into harnessing the methane. www.skaar.101main.net wrote: >termites do produce a lot of heat, it's for the queen and eggs. I think for the fungus gardens, mainly, and thence for the whole nest. (Termites don't actually eat wood, they use the wood to grow a special fungus which is the only thing they can eat.) The fungus gardens maintain the temperature and humidity at precise levels throughout the nest. A termite nest probably isn't a lot less complicated than a city. More coherent though - it makes better sense to view the nest itself as the individual animal, and the termites as its body-cells, grouped into the various organs: stomach, lungs, bloodstream, brain (the queen with her pheromones), etc. Everything except legs. And it farts a lot. I once found a termite nest with TWO queens, and one king, closed up together in the royal chamber. Never heard of that before, nor since. The queens were about 3 in. long with their bloated egg-sac bodies. The fungus gardens were amazing, definitely the most wonderful farm I've seen, tended by specialised workers without pigmentation, like creatures of glass. Underneath it all were little compost piles made up of the chewed-up wood the termites carried into the nest. They seemed to assemble the piles more or less molecule by molecule to produce the special substrate the fungus grows on, a real bio-engineering masterwork. They were also using manure worms (red wrigglers) as part of the composting process, they had a whole bunch of them in there. I've read that other types of termites use other creatures in this way, like cockroaches eg. I've not heard much about the agricultural benefits of cockroach crap! Strange and wonderful creatures, termites. It's hard to imagine quite how and why they developed into this ecological niche. Anyway, it's a complex and subtle business. I imagine it wouldn't be too easy to adapt it in any way for methane production, but it's certainly worth checking out. I didn't deliberately destroy that nest with two queens, by the way. It was when I was farming in Hong Kong. Hong Kong termites have underground nests, no towers. I was hoeing a field and wrecked the nest before I even knew it was there. Best Keith Addison Journey to Forever Handmade Projects Tokyo http://journeytoforever.org/ >[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > I just heard that termite produce a lot of methane. Could you use > > termites to produce methane? > > > > Could termites have higher conversion rates? > > > > Maybe termites would allow methane to be produced without heat. > > > > I'm not a regular biofuel guy, so if I've said something completely > > ludicrous... > > > > Regards, > > > > Michael Dewolf > >-- >www.skaar.101main.net Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
