Why the Termite Mound Breathes: How Animals Build What Our Architects Envy: 4

On the plains of Namibia stand towers of red earth taller than a man, with no doors and no windows. Beneath each one lives a colony of a million termites, farming fungus underground, and the air inside stays fit to breathe. For fifty years the explanation was a chimney. It was elegant, it was in the textbooks, and it inspired a famous office building. When scientists finally put sensors inside a working mound, it turned out to be wrong. The mound breathes once a day, and the sun drives it. Why the Termite Mound Breathes takes twenty-four structures built by animals and finishes each one with the mechanism. Not wonder: the experiment, the number, and, where the answer took a long time, the wrong answers people believed first. Inside you will find: - The termite mound that is not a chimney, and the building copied from the wrong theory that works anyway - Why the honeycomb is hexagonal, and who really makes the hexagons: the bees or the wax - A spider web built to break in exactly the right place - Army ants that build bridges out of their own bodies, and move them to a better spot - Ten thousand honeybees choosing a new home by something very close to a vote - The beaver that starts building when it hears running water - A bowerbird that lays out a stage to fool the eye from one exact spot - And a queue of hermit crabs that turns one empty shell into several new homes Twenty-four short chapters, six full plates and ten hand drawn diagrams for the places where a picture says it better than a sentence. The book ends with a quiz and a page of sources. It closes with an honest accounting: what we really copied from animal builders, what we only thought we copied, and the one thing no architect has managed at all. For readers of Mike Hansell and Ed Yong, and for anyone who has ever stopped to look at a spider web in the morning light. The Impossible Animal, Volume Four.