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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

THE PROCESS. “Mound building is therefore a two-step expression of superorganismal homeostasis, ψ-homeostasis motivating the rough draft, which is then refined by φ-homeostasis into the fully functional lung.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

REGIONAL DECISIONS. "Most decisions made by plants about growth and development do seem to involve communication between all parts of the plant, but with prominence in the decision given to meristems local to the signal." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/92/1/1.full View in LinkedIn

HYDRATION METRICS. “Mound building therefore requires a termite colony to manage a net flow of water through the nest. This in turn implies that the colony must have some cognitive awareness of its own hydration state, and the capability of managing it. Evidently, they are very good at it, because nest moisture is very tightly regulated, maintaining a relative humidity of around 80 % throughout the year in the face of strong seasonal variation in soil moisture and ambient humidity.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

SIGNAL MOLECULES. "Quite remarkably, the suite of molecules used in signal transduction are entirely similar between nerve cells and plant cells." http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/content/92/1/1.full View in LinkedIn

WATER CONTROL. “In the course of maintaining a mound, a colony will move about 250 kg dry weight of soil each year to the mound surface from deeper soil horizons. This corresponds to roughly eighty liters of water that must be invested annually to maintain the mound (mound growth will require more). Meanwhile, a generous estimate of the colony’s reserves of liquid water amounts to about fifty liters at any one time.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12304-016-9256-5 View in LinkedIn

PREDICTIVE MODELING. "When young trees were provided with water only once a year, over the next several years they learned to predict when the water would be supplied and synchronised their growth with its appearance. Again this an obvious case of predictive modeling followed by fitness changes in growth and development." http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00114-005-0014-9 View in LinkedIn