The Guardian has a great article about termites. I’ve been fascinated by them for a long time after reading about their engineering skills. Fascinating creatures.
Here is a excerpt and link to the article:
Termites who spend a year building an average mound of 3 metres have just built, in comparison to their size, the Empire State Building. Those who build taller mounds, at nearly 5 metres, have just built the Burj Khalifa in Dubai – 830 metres and 163 floors of vertigo – with no architect and no structural engineer. Such unthinking, seat-of-the-pants design is not possible for humans, who required squads of professionals, advanced equipment and 7,500 people working for six years to build the Burj Khalifa. Working with Turner, engineer Rupert Soar hoped to harness the powerful constructive groupthink that comes from the tiny mouths of termites and their even tinier brains to build structures in remote environments such as Mars. But there were issues: termites, he said, engineer to the point of collapse.
theguardian.com