The award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli, national bestselling author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, investigates the environmental and economic impact termites inflict on human societies in this fascinating examination of one of nature’s most misunderstood insects. Are we more like termites than we ever imagined? In Underbug, the award-winning 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—and yet, in Margonelli’s telling, seem weirdly familiar. Over the course of a decade-long obsession with the little bugs, Margonelli pokes around termite mounds and high-tech research facilities, closely watching biologists, roboticists, and geneticists. Her globe-trotting journey veers into uncharted territory, from evolutionary theory to Edwardian science literature to the military industrial complex. What begins as a natural history of the termite becomes a personal exploration of the unnatural future we’re building, with darker observations on power, technology, historical trauma, and the limits of human cognition. Whether in Namibia or Cambridge, Arizona or Australia, Margonelli turns up astounding facts and raises provocative questions. Is a termite an individual or a unit of a superorganism? Can we harness the termite’s properties to change the world? If we build termite-like swarming robots, will they inevitably destroy us? Is it possible to think without having a mind? Underbug burrows into these questions and many others—unearthing disquieting answers about the world’s most underrated insect and what it means to be human.

Biology of Termites, a Modern Synthesis brings together the major advances in termite biology, phylogenetics, social evolution and biogeography. In this new volume, David Bignell, Yves Roisin and Nathan Lo have brought together leading experts on termite taxonomy, behaviour, genetics, caste differentiation, physiology, microbiology, mound architecture, biogeography and control. Very strong evolutionary and developmental themes run through the individual chapters, fed by new data streams from molecular sequencing, and for the first time it is possible to compare the social organisation of termites with that of the social Hymenoptera, focusing on caste determination, population genetics, cooperative behaviour, nest hygiene and symbioses with microorganisms. New chapters have been added on termite pheromones, termites as pests of agriculture and on destructive invasive species.

Watch one of nature’s hardest-working insect families in action—termites! Hundreds of thousands of termites can live together in one nest. The termite queen spends her life laying eggs. The eggs hatch into workers that clean the queen, watch over the eggs, search for food, tend the nest’s gardens, and guard the nest and each other. But a termite family’s most amazing feat is building the huge mound that protects the nest. Thousands of tiny termites take mouthfuls of soil from ground level and climb to the top of the mound. Mouthful by mouthful, the soil piles up until the mound is up to six feet (3 meters) across! In this exciting book, you can learn what makes mound-building termites similar to and different from other insects. Close-up photographs and diagrams reveal extraordinary details about termites’ bodies, both inside and out. And you can perform an experiment that shows you how termites use scent trails to find their way to food and home again. Learn more about this exciting member of nature’s fascinating Insect World.

The book is a new compendium in which leading termite scientists review the advances of the last 30 years in our understanding of phylogeny, fossil records, relationships with cockroaches, social evolution, nesting, behaviour, mutualisms with archaea, protists, bacteria and fungi, nutrition, energy metabolism,population and community ecology, soil conditioning, greenhouse gas production and pest status.

This text provides a scientific introduction to termites, including their behaviour, pest status and control.

Termite classification, biology and geographical distribution, Nests, mounds and galleries, Termites as soil animals, Termite populations, Effects on physical and chemical characteristics of soils, Effects on decomposition of organic matter and its incorporation in the soil, Modifications of soil profile morphology, Effects on vegetation, Agricultural significance of termites, Some ecological comparisons.

How does a bird flock keep its movements so graceful and synchronized? Most people assume that the bird in front leads and the others follow. In fact, bird flocks don't have leaders: they are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. And a surprising number of other systems, from termite colonies to traffic jams to economic systems, work the same decentralized way. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams describes innovative new computational tools that can qhelp people (even young children) explore the workings of such systems—and help them move beyond the centralized mindset.