The Termite Biological Control Continued Optimism Must Face its Ongoing Absence of Potential

The following piece is unusual in all respects, as it does not follow the rigorous objective nature of a scientific review. As a fair warning, it is instead a rather personal opinion piece, so as to hopefully generate much-needed discussions within a relatively small field of research, yet a remarkably persistent one. Here, I have the opportunity to express a personal perspective and share my experiences about the general field of termite biological control research, and I truly hope that the obvious frustration permeating from these lines will be processed by the reader as a friendly -yet realistic- analysis of the termite biological control endeavor. From interacting with many colleagues in the past two decades while sharing my pessimistic views on the topic, I noticed two opposite reactions: the first one was in the lines of “we all already know, Thomas, why do you keep beating on that dead horse?,” while the second one was more like “You can’t say that Thomas, we just need more innovative research to make it work!” Such discrepancies in reactions reflect the two mutually exclusive realities that I personally have to interact with regularly, as a solicited reviewer and as a reader keeping up with the termite literature. Consequently, the writing process of the following opinion is inherently tainted with value judgment -some would say ‘incendiary’- but I find it most genuinely necessary so as to move the discussion into a non-candid realm, which remains at the core of the issue. Finally, while I may be wrong on some of these statements, as a putative research breakthrough may change the equation in a distant future, I may stay correct for a foreseeable one. Overall, I hope this piece will help any new venturer on this topic to be skeptical of the accumulated literature and to take the time to look at the larger picture before engaging in such research. In this opinion piece, 1) I review the termite biological control from an academic perspective, and 2) I then discuss what happened to this field of research since 2011 while highlighting the lingering problems surrounding termite biological control research.