Is a termite mound part of the termite ?

The few that survive shed their wings and pair off, male and female. Then they burrow into the earth, future kings and queens. The pair will remain there, alone in a dark hole, for the rest of their lives. They bite off the ends of their antennae, reducing their acute sensitivity; perhaps it’s a means of making more bearable a life wholly given over to procreation.

The South African naturalist and poet Eugène Marais described the queen’s fate in “The Soul of the White Ant” (first published, in Afrikaans, in 1934): “Although you will apparently be an immobile shapeless mass buried in a living grave, you will actually be a sensitive mainspring. You will become the feeling, the thinking, the seeing, of a life a thousand times greater and more important than yours could ever have become.”

A termite colony, which may contain a million bugs, has about the same metabolic rate as a nine-hundred-pound cow, and, like cows (and humans), termites breathe in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide. The mound acts as a lung for the colony, managing the exchange of gases, leveraging small changes in wind speed to inhale and exhale. The mound functions as a humidifier, too, tightly regulating moisture levels across wet and dry seasons. Some termite species partly outsource their digestion through the practice of fungiculture—the farming of a grass-eating fungus, which they store, tend, and feed in an elaborate garden maze below the mound.

It is generally agreed that individual termites are not particularly intelligent, lacking memory and the ability to learn. Put a few termites into a petri dish and they wander around aimlessly; put in forty and they start stampeding around the dish’s perimeter like a herd. But put enough termites together, in the right conditions, and they will build you a cathedral.

In Turner’s view, the physical termite mound—with its mud tunnels and walls, digested wood and grass and fungus—is part of the termite, rather than part of the environment on which the termite acts. The entire mound—insects plus structure—is thus a living thing: a self-regulating physiological and cognitive system, with a sense of its own boundaries, a memory, and a kind of collective intentionality.

The Department of Energy says that the U.S. can produce 1.3 billion tons of dry biomass—from harvested trees, cornstalks, high-energy grasses, and the like—without taking anything away from regular agricultural uses. If humans can crack the code to termite digestion, the U.S. could turn the stuff into nearly a hundred billion gallons of biofuel a year—what’s sometimes called “grassoline”—and thereby reduce automobile emissions by eighty-six per cent.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/what-termites-can-teach-us?mbid=nl_Daily+091118&CNDID=37723187&utm_source=Silverpop&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily+091118&utm_content&spMailingID=14227848&spUserID=MTMzMTgzOTQ3MzE4S0&spJobID=1480908966&spReportId=MTQ4MDkwODk2NgS2