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THE PARAMETERS. “Termites can interpret this field because they act essentially as mobile φ-transducers. In the steady regime of the nest, (low- to null φ), termites will carry out their activities unperturbed. A threshold change of φ, however, elicits a marked shift of the swarm’s behavior. In response to a pulse of CO2, for example, termites immediately stop what they are doing and begin to move about vigorously. They do not move about randomly, however. Some termites will rush toward the source of the perturbation. Others, called tocsins (“bell-ringers”) run away from the source and agitate other termites that may not have experienced the pulse directly. Eventually, a large wave of termites runs toward the perturbation source, consisting of termites that have experienced the perturbation directly as well as those…

ASSUMPTIONS. “In a DC field of, say, oxygen partial pressure (PO2), one can predict with some reliability, r(PO2), what the actual PO2 at a particular location in the mound might be, irrespective of time. Indeed, that is the very nature of a DC field: it contains within it no dimension of time. What is mapped in an AC perturbation field, in contrast, is the likelihood of a particular time-dependent change of PO2, that is dPO2/dt. For sake of brevity, let us call this φ (= dP/dt). Any location within a transient perturbation field is characterized by some probability distribution, r(φ). Within the mound, r(φ) is broad at the periphery, and tends toward peaked and skewed to low frequency in the center.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

THE ANALOGY. “These are very steady values: to use an electrical analogy, the nest environment maintains a “DC” difference in oxygen, CO2 and water vapor partial pressures with the outside environment, analogous to the steady DC voltage that exists across the poles of a battery. It is these DC potential energy differences that ultimately drive the exchange of respiratory gases and water vapor upon which the colony’s survival depends. On their own, however, these DC differences cannot support a high enough exchange rate, so the colony exploits wind energy to enhance the flux. The mound is the physiological interface for wind to do this work.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

HUMIDITY CONTROL. “The fungus combs also act as high-capacity dampers for water vapor, holding nest humidity to about 80 % in the face of short-term fluctuations in environmental moisture.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

PRECISE REGULATION. “In an undisturbed colony with a properly functioning mound, the nest atmosphere is different from the atmosphere outside. The collective metabolism of the colony, for example, depresses nest oxygen concentration by about 2 kilopascals partial pressure below atmospheric, and elevates nest carbon dioxide concentration by a similar amount.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

ALIGNMENT WITH THE WIND. “The swarm’s cognitive awareness of mound structure relies upon how the mound translates its interaction with environmental wind into a form this fluid network can interpret. This takes the form of a “map”, a field of wind-induced transient perturbation within the airways of the mound and nest.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

THE MENTAL MAP. “Mounds and termite colonies at first seem to be an unusual context for a cognitive system to operate. Nevertheless, they arguably meet the requirement. Cognitive systems are fundamentally representation systems: they map an environment onto some interpretable (mental) representation. In conventional cognitive systems, i.e. those that are housed in brains within discrete bodies, sensory transducers encode information about the environment, communications links convey the code to processors which interpret the code and converse with other processors to arrive at a coherent representational map.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

EXOSKELETON. “It is worth reiterating that the termites do not live in the mound, but in the subterranean nest. Thus, termite workers must somehow become aware of, and respond appropriately to, structural perturbations that may be situated as far as three meters from where they live. This betokens an impressive degree of what might be called “swarm cognition”.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn