While the idea that the Great Wall of China can be seen from space has been exposed as a myth, some supersized building projects can be spotted from orbit – and not all of them were made by humans. Syntermes dirus, a termite species native to Brazil, has created a vast collection of 7ft-tall mounds that covers an area the size of Great Britain.

Each mound can take thousands of years to complete, reaching almost 30 feet in width. But there are so many of these so-called “murundas,” an estimated two hundred million at last count, that together they have become a massive landmark that can be seen from many miles above.

While the Great Pyramid of Cheops is often hailed as an architectural triumph, the tiny termites have moved approximately 10 km3 (2.4 cu mi) of soil, enough to make four thousand stacks each the size of the iconic Egyptian monument. It’s been described as the equivalent of humans constructing a building four times the height of the Burj Khalifa, or 320 times as tall as Big Ben, all without blueprints, surveyors or pesky health and safety regulations.

The little bugs, a shade over half an inch long, live almost exclusively on fallen leaves from a single species of tree. Scientists say their massive mounds are simply the waste piles for a huge network of interconnected underground “cities” that extends for many miles.

The hard, dry and comparatively infertile soil in the area is not only good for building, but unattractive to farmers so the mounds have stood undisturbed for, in some cases, up to 4,000 years.

While locals have known about the mounds for many centuries, the sheer scale and remarkable regularity of the construction was only revealed comparatively recently after they were seen in satellite photos.

Stephen Martin from the University of Salford, told New Scientist in 2018: “I looked on Google Earth and realised they’re everywhere in this area, but I could find nothing about them online.”

The termites will collect small, thorny leaves from the nearby caatinga forests that only fall once a year, and Martin says there’s a mad scramble to collect as many as possible: “It’s like if all the supermarkets were open for one day a year — the person with the fastest car would get the most food,” he explains.

“You need a network of roads to get to the supermarket as quickly as you can because you’re in open competition with other colonies.”

Each mound does not represent a separate colony, researchers have found, because there is no aggression between the termites from each “murunda” and their immediate neighbours.

However, if termites are taken from their native mound and transplanted to one a few miles distant, then a fight will inevitably break out.

It’s not yet clear how far the borders of each termite colony extend. While most termite colonies are centred around a single egg-laying queen, Stephen Martin and his research team have so far been unable to locate a royal chamber in any of the mounds they have excavated so the structure of the colonies, as well as their size, remains unknown.

Another puzzle, Martin says, is how how the termites manage to survive when their food supply is only available for such a short period. “We don’t know of any [termite] species that hibernate, but maybe they do,” he says.