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The queen termite is an egg-laying machine, producing an egg every three seconds from her enormous, pulsating abdomen. That adds up to about 30,000 eggs in one day.
She secretes a pheromone that stimulates the much smaller worker termites attending her to catch her eggs and carry them to a nursery chamber where they will develop and grow.
In addition to increasing the size of her colony, the queen is inevitably also providing an important food source for a wide variety of predators. Termites contain three times as much protein as a T-bone steak.
