Are we more like termites than we ever imagined? In "Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology" (Oneworld), journalist Lisa Margonelli introduces us to the enigmatic creatures that collectively outweigh human beings ten to one and consume $40 billion worth of valuable stuff annually. In her book, Margonelli talks to biologists, robotocists and geneticists, giving a potted natural history of the termite, but also exploring questions around technology, power and the future we are building. Here, she discusses her findings.
What got you interested in termites?
In 2008, I was reporting about oil and climate and I heard of a government lab that was looking at the microbes in termite guts (which can digest wood) as a model for making biofuels from grass and wood. I wrote about the project for the Atlantic. Afterwards, the researcher, Phil Hugenholtz, invited me on a “Termite Safari,” as the lab collected termites in the Arizona desert. While I was there I saw termites as creatures that are somehow important in the inscrutable desert landscape; Right in front of me was this natural history—the termites and all their superorganismy weirdness—that was destined for an unnatural future in a test tube and maybe our gas tanks. I was intrigued and ended up following termites and scientists--including roboticists and mathematical ecologists-- to Australia and Namibia and back to labs in Emeryville California and Cambridge Massachusetts for nearly a decade.
The shorter answer is that I was having some kind of mid-life crisis and instead of buying a car (which wouldn’t make any sense) I latched on to termites to try to understand how the world works and what we, as humans, are doing. And really, the termites turned out to be the perfect guide to the universe!
What is the relationship between termites and humans?
From the human perspective, when we see a termite, we try to kill it. End of story. But only 27 out of 2900 species eat buildings, so most termites don’t hurt us. They may even outweigh us humans by 10 to one, though experts dispute those estimates. But, oddly, the pesty termites species are ones that thrive in landscapes disrupted by humans, with heavy development. So humans really encourage the spread of our own pests. The “good” termites who eat grass and fertilise vast savannahs have to move out when we arrive and the ones who eat our houses move in. So who’s fault is that, really?
Termites play a big role in keeping the world running: they eat up dead wood and grass and then fertilise the earth with their faeces, while digging holes and rearranging soil in ways that can make it hold water better. They do this in forests, of course, but they also do in dry lands where they directly lead to the prospering of big herbivores like elephants and giraffes—all things we humans enjoy seeing. New research suggests that termites will keep dry grasslands from becoming deserts by making the landscape more resilient—which is exactly what we’ll need as humans change the climate.
What are the biggest misconceptions about termites?
That they’re destructive and boring. On the whole, their positive effects on the planet are greater than the damage they do to structures. And they’re hardly boring—I spent ten years thinking about them and I feel I’ve barely started! Termites can build mounds taller (in proportion to their size) than the tallest skyscrapers, without a plan. They can rearrange the dirt so it holds water differently. They can fight off diseases using their social tricks (which is one reason it’s so hard to kill them.) They may even “tune” the inside of some of their mounds to a resonant frequency, like an organ pipe. A whole nest of termites may have some power of group cognition, some kind of smart swarminess, which our brains still can’t process. The longer I looked at termites the more interesting they got!
You say that termites get less attention than other insects.
Bees are really important! They pollinate plants. But bees and ants get all the attention for social insects, not just in popular culture, but also in academia, while termites and wasps get a lot less love. When you look at fossils from the Carboniferous period, you’ll see all these trees, which stayed standing and fossilised. Why? Termites were not apparently eating them yet. Our world would be filled with dead wood and grass if not for termites and other decomposers. We’d hardly see the sun; who knows how we would have evolved without them?
What can the study of termites tell us about technology?
The things that termites do—eating wood, coordinating parts without a master plan, making land more fertile—are all things that humans want to do to live more lightly on the earth while exerting more control. Our past has been harnessing big forces of the earth—hydroelectric dams, drilling for oil, gas and coal—and building a huge network of pipelines and tankers around the earth. Our future is in harnessing the very small—small robots and sensors, microbes that can produce chemicals in stunning quantities, emergent systems where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts—and termites are a perfect model of that. They are a little guide to some of the big questions that we’ll have to wrestle with. For example, if a system is self-organising, and the small parts use feedback systems to control the whole thing, how can we, as humans working from the top, control that? How do we harness the power of microbes if we don’t fully understand their role in making the world we live in? How do we create a future that we want, with input from many people rather than simply letting technology that serves the military or the market succeed?
Which of the termites’ properties could be harnessed to change the world?
Termites are already changing the world by increasing fertility in the world’s temperate zones and they are likely to help dry areas resist desertification as the climate changes. In Africa and Australia, they have proved to be tremendously useful in rehabilitating land that’s been damaged by mining and overgrazing. They may even be useful for farming: One Australian study found that dry fields that allowed the growth of termites and ants increased their wheat production by a third—without using fertiliser.
Termites are also an inspiration for both robots and software. Termites can build structures without a master plan—many industries would like to harness that possibility with autonomous construction robots. Termites also build structures that self-ventilate and maintain comfortable temperatures—which Nottingham engineering professor Rupert Soar would like to emulate. What’s more, termite’s ability to gather information (and grass) as a group could be valuable for developing software and systems that are intelligent and self-healing—maybe fixing computer networks or routing traffic or understanding epidemics.
Finally, if humans could get lab microbes, like E. coli, to disassemble cellulose in a steel tank the way termites do in their guts, we could begin to replace fossil fuels with biologically-derived chemicals. For all of my life, the smell of chemicals and refineries has been hydrocarbons—that petroleum smell. When you go into a synthetic biology lab today there’s a different smell: It’s a little bit yeasty and sweet and unnervingly alive. That, I think, is how chemistry will smell a generation or so from now.
