How do tiny termites make such massive mounds?
Termite construction projects have no architects, engineers, or foremen, yet these centimeter-sized insects build complex, long-standing, meter-sized structures all over the world. How they do it has long puzzled scientists. Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology have developed a simple model that shows how external environmental factors, such as daytime temperature variations, cause internal flows in the mound, which move pheromone-like cues around, triggering building behavior in individual termites. Those modifications change the internal environment, triggering new behaviors and the cycle continues. The model explains how differences in the environment lead to the distinct morphologies of termite mounds in Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America. This new framework demonstrates how simple rules linking environmental physics and animal behavior can give rise to complex structures in nature. It sheds light on broader questions of swarm intelligence and may...