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Answer:
The insects was among the first to settle upon the surface about 400 million years ago, during the geological interval called the Devonian period. The first termites are believed to have arisen around the Jurassic/Cretaceous periods about 200 million years ago. The termite family is not connected to the ants’ family tree and do not share the same gene pool. They belong to their very own order, the Isoptera (while ants belong to Hymenoptera). Just like ants the termites are eusocial and a good example of the possibilities of social behaviours to develop without the influence of each other. A few years later (you know, a couple of million years), more exactly during the Early Tertiary period (50-60 million years ago), ants and termites where the dominant insects on Earth. (1)
So why didn’t this behaviour evolve until after 200 million years? The answer is complicated. There are both pros and cons to a eusocial life. After all, there are still solitary insects out there, successfully navigating its way through history and the geological periods. The fact is that the large societies and structures that the eusocial group engineer are time and resource-demanding to build and to maintain. When the solitary insect can focus its energy and time on finding food, raising offspring and survive long enough to be replaced by the latter, the ants have a more dire task ahead. They must produce large quantities of infertile workers to care for the, in comparison, microscopic egg laying caste (the queens). When the colony is strong enough, which can take years, it can begin its work with fertile offspring. During which the solitary has gone through many generations of their own. The solitary insects are also very mobile – with the ability of getting in and out of areas in a jiffy – whereas the eusocial requires an enormous amount of work and risk-taking to do the same. The advantages of a solitary life must not be forgotten, but nothing really stands a chance against a mature colony of eusocials.
Another advantage of social life is the ability to control terrain and draw up territories. Food and other resources can be claimed and are hard for a solitary individual to get a hold of. And in species where the ants create new queens by letting them mate on the roof and then walk back down, the long lifecycle allows for a firm grip of the surroundings. (2)
