Alva Review-Courier -

PALMEIRAS, Brazil (AP) — Roy Funch, an American botanist who has lived and worked in Brazil's hardscrabble northeast for decades, long looked at huge cone-shaped mounds of mud in the distance and wondered.

What built them? How many were there? How long had they been there?

After years of failing to generate interest in the mounds, a chance meeting with an English expert on social insects, Stephen Martin, led to remarkable discoveries: There are over 200 million mounds built by termites that stretch across 88,800 square miles (230,000 square kilometers), about the size of Great Britain.

What's...