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THE INJURY TEST OF MEMORY. “For the mound to serve its respiratory function, the colony must have knowledge, in some form, of how the mound is structured. That the colony has such knowledge is revealed dramatically by the response to mound injury, such as a breach of the mound surface by a soil auger. This initiates an immediate repair program that plugs the damaged mound, usually in less than a day, and often within a few hours of the injury. This is followed by an extended process of remodeling that, over periods that can span years, restores the damaged part of the mound to its form and functionality prior to the injury.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

HEREDITARY MEMORY, “For the workers, therefore, the environment they inhabit and interpret is both constructed by them, and is a hereditary legacy of past generations of workers. Indeed, this legacy need not be limited to the lifespan of a single colony: a small proportion of abandoned nests are re-colonized, so that elements of the mound built by a past generation can be passed on to a future one. This has interesting implications for the nature of hereditary memory.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

COLONY LIFESPANS. “A colony usually starts with a single mated pair (sometimes multiple pairs) and the small nuptial chamber they dig once alates have paired off and begin to reproduce. As the population of workers grows, so too does the mound, reaching a steady height at the same time the population of workers stabilizes at 1–2 million. This commonly takes 4–5 years. The mound will last as long as the queen’s lifespan, which is estimated to be 15–20 years, but the lifespan of the workers that actually build and maintain the mound is considerably shorter, on the order of a few months.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

COLONY MEMORY THROUGH GENERATIONS. “The colony’s impressive longevity and the overlap and staggering of generations of workers within means that interpretation of the mound structure by termite workers can both be immediate as well as being transmitted across generations of workers as a form of memory.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

INTERPRETATIVE RESPONSE. “This upward flux of soil helps maintain the mound in the face of erosion from wind and rain. The structure of the mound is thus a balance between two opposing fluxes of soil: erosion-mediated loss, offset by termite-mediated deposition. The mound’s structure changes if the rate and pattern of either soil flux changes. Semiotic issues arise because the movement of soil by termites is neither random nor automatic, but is mediated by a host of signs that the workers must interpret, both individually and en masse as a swarm. This is a key aspect of the mound’s adaptability: the pattern of deposition is, to an extent, a reflection of how the workers interpret the structure they build.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn