Neither side wants the other to attack them, so they have guards making sure of it.
More specifically: ants are voracious predators that habitually invade and destroy the nests of other insects, termites included. I can’t tell you why these specific ants aren’t attacking the termites- we just don’t have the information needed- but it’s possible that they just don’t have the numbers to overcome the difference in size, or that there’s something more important going on than the need for food. So instead they set guards and move on with their little ant business.
The termites aren’t attacking because termites aren’t aggressive. But they don’t want to be attacked by the ants either. So they set guards and move about their little termite business.
Funny thing is that ants are little more than biological robots, essentially. All their incredible coordination is due to a complex system of signals, chemicals and hormones, which ants are basically programed to respond to robotically. It’s why when a disruption occurs, you can have weird situations like a whole group of ants running in a circle until they starve to death.
There’s a lot of dead ants on the ground in front of the termites. The ants probably released a chemical on death, and it’s abundance is warning off all the other ants from attacking.
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