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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

COMPLEX PROBLEM. "It is very clear that the construction and maintenance of an accurate spatial map of a large plant such as a tree would demand huge processing power. Thousands of leaves and roots, each having a need to sense their local environment to serve their own needs, would produce very large amounts of data. The data would be changing by the minute as the leaves fluttered in a breeze and the roots explored their very heterogeneous environment." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/4/345.full View in LinkedIn