A giant crawling brain: the world of termites (2018)

I was surprised to read this entire article without seeing the word "emergent". If you found this article interesting, there's a great book on this topic that compares ants, slime molds, brains and cities: how simple organisms create seemingly intelligent behavior. It's like G.E.B. in how it ties together disparate domains, but not as brutal.

Emergence The Connected Lives Of Ants Brains Cities & Software by Steven Johnson

https://www.powells.com/book/emergence-the-connected-lives-o...

I saw a termite "migration" a few weeks ago (I think that's what it was, I haven't looked it up). Never seen anything like it. It was very interesting. (SW USA desert).

It happened outside at dusk after a few days of rain. I saw this swarm of winged insects kind of flitting about, really weird, almost surreal. I hadn't seen that kind before and followed them to the edge of the yard. There were a bunch of tiny holes with more of the winged insects emerging. Surrounding the holes were what I suppose were worker termites with no wings. A big mass of them completely surrounding each hole, guarding it as the winged ones emerged.

Meanwhile big harvester ants were trying to get in and grab the emerging winged termites and the "worker" termites were mobbing them with 5 or 10 termites swarming each ant and clinging to it's legs or climbing on and I presume biting them. The ants were trying to shake them off. I did see one or two ants that successfully had captured a winged termite and were on the way back to the burrow with them.

I had no idea there were even termites there. Anyway it was super neat, the coordination and guarding and fending off of the harvester ants.

This video of sir David Attenborough crawling (himself!) into a termite's nest is absolutely epic

https://youtu.be/jbbLCgh6sso

Sounds like the metaphors we apply to insect colonies - defining Queen, soldiers, and workers, or seeing factories, or brains, occlude a more objective understanding of how they organise themselves.

It's interesting, if we encouter aliens, they might not have individuals but rather collective singularities like termites:

what is “one” termite? Is it one individual termite? Is it one termite with its symbiotic gut microbes, an entity that can eat wood but cannot reproduce on its own? Or is it a colony, a whole living, breathing structure, occupied by a few million related individuals and a gazillion symbionts who collectively constitute “one”?

Or consider

In the future, we will harness nature’s tiniest life forms – microbes and insects – both their systems of organisation and control, and their genes and chemical capabilities. This fits with our paradoxical desire to have a lighter footprint on the Earth while having greater control over its processes.

Haha, the "lighter footprint" is just performative virtue-signaling. What we actually want is more control, it's just an anthropocentric survival instinct that has us batshit hysteria insane for climate change and "lighter" ecological footprints. We don't give a shit about the animals and trees, as a collective, we're just in it for ourselves, while still pretending we're on top, subconsciously acknowledging our interdependence and acting accordingly.

This article should be a literary classic. It contains gems like:

Male and female find each other and scuttle off to dig a burrow where they will mate. At first the two termites will be alone in their dark hole. Christine Nalepa, Theo Evans and Michael Lenz have written that termite parents bite off the ends of their antennae, which may make them better at raising their young. Antennae give termites lots of sensory information, and biting off the segments toward the ends could reduce that stimulation, making it easier to live in a tiny burrow with a few million children.

Did you know there's a hyena specialized in eating termites? The size of a large cat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4J6NsM2Cco

There are more strange critters associated with termites. Aardvarks look like some kind of alien and have no close relatives in animal world. The closest would probably be elephant. They may look like a mere curiosity, but are ultra fast diggers (5 minutes to dig a burrow) and their strategy involves digging a lot of them so they always have a hideout nearby. In the end lots of their burrows ends up being occupied by other animals like warthogs. They also play a very important role in a dry season, because water gathers in those holes and animals come there to drink.