Cockroaches And Termites (Blattodea)

This group gathers Insects subcategory members belonging to the order Blattodea, which modern classification unites the ordinary cockroaches with the termites, once treated as their own separate order but now understood to have evolved from within the cockroaches as a highly social, wood- and cellulose-eating lineage. It spans familiar household cockroach pests such as the American and German cockroaches, flattened, fast-running omnivorous scavengers, and the termites, whose colonies, built around a reproductive king and queen and large numbers of sterile worker and soldier castes, can construct elaborate nest mounds and are capable of digesting wood with the help of symbiotic gut microbes, making them both vital decomposers in many ecosystems and a serious structural pest of timber buildings.