2nd Place: The proportion of foraging Coptotermes workers in relation to the number of foraging sites

The Formosan subterranean termites, Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki, forage out into the soil to search for food. This foraging task is performed by workers in the colony and approximately 20% of their workers were allocated to foraging when the colony has a single foraging site, according to most laboratory studies. However, C. formosanus is known to forage multiple food resources simultaneously. For this study, two-year-old colonies of C. formosanus were used to investigate if the proportion of foraging workers changes when more than one foraging site is available. We used five C. formosanus colonies and connected each of them to either a single or two foraging sites, and determine the forager proportion in each groupThe average proportion of workers in the one and two foraging site group was approximately 20%, showing no significant difference. The results suggest that C. formosanus colonies allocate approximately 20% of their workers to foraging regardless of the number of foraging sites available.