Termites are considered opponents to the anthropogenic built environment yet are accomplished architects and engineers of their own dwellings.
First pass information:
Amitermes are the highly eusocial architects of ‘magnetic’ termite mounds of the Northern Territory, Australia, built as and named for their north-south oriented sails.
Mound geometry built in response to and as modifiers of environmental abiotic stimuli including thermal oscillations, humidity, and potentially magnetic fields. Micro climatic engineering as a response to macro climatic influence.
Biotic factors including pheromone production and deposition and respiration interplay with abiotic factors to generate collective, self-organised, mound building behaviours and influence mound formation.
Stigmergy; global scale collective patterns emergent from locally driven individual behaviours. (note: appears to be multiple definitions)
Incompletely understood mechanisms include pheromone templating through global advection and localised deposition, gradients of metabolic gases and biotremology.
Sunlight as a source of radial asymmetry and cyclic asymmetric growth across time scales of days and years. Measure degree of north-south orientation at various latitudes in Amitermes mounds.
Mound building behaviour disrupted by burial of magnets in opposition to earths magnetic field; suggesting some influence of compass mechanisms or nanoparticles may function in insect orientation.
Mounds are pushed upwards due to subterranean foraging and storage of cut grass in outer chambers. Made of displaced sand adhered with saliva, and termite excreta.
Mound lifecycle 100yrs. The life of the queen.
Exterior surface of termite mound NT, Australia, 2021. Pip Beale
Questions:
Can abiotic factors including temperature, light and magnetic fields be altered to influence mound building behaviour of Amitermes termites and generate structures with different forms?
Can biotic factors such as pheromone templating, vibrational communication, or metabolic gas gradients be augmented to generate divergent mound forms through influence on collective behaviour of termites?
Does the chemical composition of substrates influence mound formation and interaction with abiotic factors. Red sand of central desert contains high levels of iron, does this interfere with magnetoreception?
Select References
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3977-4_13
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1818759116
https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00317628
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1423242112
https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2000.2010
https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.143347
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csbj.2020.08.012