The use of tympanic arena as alternative for behavioral vibroacoustic essays in termites

Termites communicate via substrate by vibroacoustic behavior. Because the substrate vibration can disseminate information quickly, this behavior has been reported to be important in the alarm signals. The alarm signals play a significant role in termites' life. Therefore, studies aimed at improving knowledge about the vibroacoustic communication has become increasingly common. Such studies are performed in arenas under laboratory conditions. Commonly, these arenas are Petri dishes made of plastic or glass. However, these materials are rigid and compact. Materials possessing this characteristic has a limited transmission of vibrational waves. Thus, using these materials as experimental arenas flooring may be a problem for the vibroacoustic behavior studies since the data recorded may be imprecise. So, we inspected which arena shows lowest interferences in recorded data from a vibratory stimulus. Using an accelerometer to record the data, we tested the hypothesis that the arena made with a tympan-like configuration portrays the data of a known vibratory stimuli, equivalent to the vibratory behavior of a termite species Constrictermes cyphergaster more authentically than arenas made of plastic or glass. From our results, we can infer that the arena which the recorded data did not differ from the data of the known vibratory stimuli was the tympanic arena. C. cyphergaster are small termites and therefore produce a subtle vibratory stimulus. Nonetheless, the tympanic arena was able to potrays the vibratory amplitudes generated by the individuals. This suggests that this arena could be used to study other groups of insects that also exhibit the vibroacustic behavior.