How is a Building Like a Termite Mound?

How is a Building Like a Termite Mound?

Author: Walt Brody

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781728418414

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"Animals build unique and beautiful homes. So do humans. But sometimes human-made buildings harm the environment. Learn how architects use biomimicry to design eco-friendly buildings"--


From Termite Den to Office Building

From Termite Den to Office Building

Author: Nel Yomtov

Publisher: Cherry Lake

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13: 1624317677

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Learn about how nature has inspired technological innovations with this book on the similarities between termite dens and a new office building design. Integrating both historical and scientific perspectives, this book explains how termite dens inspired a new office building design. Readers will make connections and examine the relationship between the two concepts. Sidebars, photographs, a glossary, and a concluding chapter on important people in the field add detail and depth to this informational text on biomimicry.


Underbug

Underbug

Author: Lisa Margonelli

Publisher: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2018-08-21

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0374712387

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The award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli, national bestselling author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, investigates the environmental and economic impact termites inflict on human societies in this fascinating examination of one of nature’s most misunderstood insects. Are we more like termites than we ever imagined? In Underbug, the award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli introduces us to the enigmatic creatures that collectively outweigh human beings ten to one and consume $40 billion worth of valuable stuff annually—and yet, in Margonelli’s telling, seem weirdly familiar. Over the course of a decade-long obsession with the little bugs, Margonelli pokes around termite mounds and high-tech research facilities, closely watching biologists, roboticists, and geneticists. Her globe-trotting journey veers into uncharted territory, from evolutionary theory to Edwardian science literature to the military industrial complex. What begins as a natural history of the termite becomes a personal exploration of the unnatural future we’re building, with darker observations on power, technology, historical trauma, and the limits of human cognition. Whether in Namibia or Cambridge, Arizona or Australia, Margonelli turns up astounding facts and raises provocative questions. Is a termite an individual or a unit of a superorganism? Can we harness the termite’s properties to change the world? If we build termite-like swarming robots, will they inevitably destroy us? Is it possible to think without having a mind? Underbug burrows into these questions and many others—unearthing disquieting answers about the world’s most underrated insect and what it means to be human.


Termites

Termites

Author: Lynn George

Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc

Published: 2010-08-15

Total Pages: 26

ISBN-13: 1448810485

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We often think of termites as destroyers rather than builders. True, they are damaging little creatures as they tunnel through wood, but termites can actually be beneficial in many ways. Extensive mounds and tunnels under the ground improve soil quality. Students will find out about nest builders, The mound builders, And The hierarchy of a termite colony through this informative life science edition.


Termites: Evolution, Sociality, Symbioses, Ecology

Termites: Evolution, Sociality, Symbioses, Ecology

Author: Y. Abe

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-11-14

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 940173223X

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The book is a new compendium in which leading termite scientists review the advances of the last 30 years in our understanding of phylogeny, fossil records, relationships with cockroaches, social evolution, nesting, behaviour, mutualisms with archaea, protists, bacteria and fungi, nutrition, energy metabolism,population and community ecology, soil conditioning, greenhouse gas production and pest status.


Biology of Termites: a Modern Synthesis

Biology of Termites: a Modern Synthesis

Author: David Edward Bignell

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-10-20

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 9048139775

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Biology of Termites, a Modern Synthesis brings together the major advances in termite biology, phylogenetics, social evolution and biogeography. In this new volume, David Bignell, Yves Roisin and Nathan Lo have brought together leading experts on termite taxonomy, behaviour, genetics, caste differentiation, physiology, microbiology, mound architecture, biogeography and control. Very strong evolutionary and developmental themes run through the individual chapters, fed by new data streams from molecular sequencing, and for the first time it is possible to compare the social organisation of termites with that of the social Hymenoptera, focusing on caste determination, population genetics, cooperative behaviour, nest hygiene and symbioses with microorganisms. New chapters have been added on termite pheromones, termites as pests of agriculture and on destructive invasive species.


Termites

Termites

Author: Sandra Markle

Publisher: LernerClassroom

Published: 2007-09-01

Total Pages: 52

ISBN-13: 0822589842

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Watch one of nature's hardest-working insect families in action termites! Hundreds of thousands of termites can live together in one nest. The termite queen spends her life laying eggs. The eggs hatch into workers that clean the queen, watch over the eggs, search for food, tend the nest's gardens, and guard the nest and each other. But a termite family's most amazing feat is building the huge mound that protects the nest. Thousands of tiny termites take mouthfuls of soil from ground level and climb to the top of the mound. Mouthful by mouthful, the soil piles up until the mound is up to six feet (3 meters) across! In this exciting book, you can learn what makes mound-building termites similar to and different from other insects. Close-up photographs and diagrams reveal extraordinary details about termites' bodies, both inside and out. And you can perform an experiment that shows you how termites use scent trails to find their way to food and home again. Learn more about this exciting member of nature's fascinating Insect World.


The Extended Organism

The Extended Organism

Author: J. Scott Turner

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-01

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0674044495

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Can the structures that animals build--from the humble burrows of earthworms to towering termite mounds to the Great Barrier Reef--be said to live? However counterintuitive the idea might first seem, physiological ecologist Scott Turner demonstrates in this book that many animals construct and use structures to harness and control the flow of energy from their environment to their own advantage. Building on Richard Dawkins's classic, The Extended Phenotype, Turner shows why drawing the boundary of an organism's physiology at the skin of the animal is arbitrary. Since the structures animals build undoubtedly do physiological work, capturing and channeling chemical and physical energy, Turner argues that such structures are more properly regarded not as frozen behaviors but as external organs of physiology and even extensions of the animal's phenotype. By challenging dearly held assumptions, a fascinating new view of the living world is opened to us, with implications for our understanding of physiology, the environment, and the remarkable structures animals build.