THERE are some clips that go viral time and again, because they’re absolutely incredible. One such clip on social media feeds is from a 2006 documentary named Ants! Nature’s secret power in which scientists discovered a massive abandoned ant city somewhere in Brazil and proceeded to pump it full of 10 tons of cement over three days so that they could take a look at its inner working.

The ant megapolis, which had been created by leafcutter ants by displacing over 40 tons of dirt was a masterpiece in construction which covered an area of 46 square met­res and reached about 8m below the surface. Dubbed the “ant equivalent of the Great Wall of China”, this megacity conta­i­ned subterranean highways linking the main chambers with ‘side roads’ connecting the highways. The ant city comes complete with dedicated fungus gardens where the ants grew their own food and separate re­fuse pits to avoid disease and contamination.

The design was so intelligent that it emerged that the entire colony, its chambers and routes were built in the most effici­ent and sustainable way possible: minimising commute time and maximising ventilation to keep its residents cool and healthy. It was a more sustainable design than most above-ground cities we live in. As per the documentary’s narrator: “Everyth­ing looks like it has been designed by an architect with a single mind … the collective will of the ant colony, the superorganism.”

A superorganism is defined as a “group of synergetically interacting organisms of the same species”, or, simply put, a group of organisms acting in concert to fulfil the will/ meet the needs of the collective. Apart from ants, bees and termites are also examples of superorganisms, as are some fungal networks. Recently, the shocking discovery was made that in the mouths of those afflicted with severe tooth decay, microbes and fungi can combine into a superorganism that can then sprout ‘limbs’ allowing it to ‘walk’ and ‘leap’ over teeth surfaces — an ability that the individual organisms do not have, thus proving that the sum is truly greater than its parts.

It’s instructive to study how insects come up with efficient designs.

The concept of superorganisms has also helped scientists better understand the human biome, in particular the complex and still little understood way in which microbes and bacteria within our body interact. The field of cybernetics, working on the concept of ‘distributed intelligence’, has also found interesting applications for this concept in yet another example of man learning from nature.

And there’s a lot to learn, especially in the field of architecture; the way that insects like termites use collective, distributed intelligence to collaborate to build enduring, sustainable structures has inspired scientists at Harvard to work on developing an army of bug bots of their own. Dubbed TERMES, this miniature automated team of robots works together to build castles, pyramids and towers out of foam blocks without any supervision, even constructing staircases when they need to reach a higher level, and responding to unexpected changes in the structure or the environment spontaneously without any need to ‘talk’ to one another — exactly how bees, ants and termites work by utilising a process of implicit communication known as ‘stigmergy’.

This means that, unlike systems where swarms of robots need a central operator giving them instructions, these robots can work more or less independently and can pick up where one leaves off. The scient­ists hope to use this model to one day have the robots construct emergency housing in remote/ disaster-stricken areas, placing sa­n­dbags where floods are expected, or even to perform simple construction tasks on the moon or on Mars.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s instructive to study how insects instinctively come up with efficient designs, and then to apply those principles to human design. Take spider webs, the design of which parallel the way humans construct suspension and cable-stay bridges. The way that spider webs can catch flies travelling at high speeds without breaking can benefit the designers of aircraft carriers aiming to secure planes landing at high speeds.

Termite mounds have also inspired architects, with the Eastgate center in Zimbabwe mimicking the cooling techniques employed in termite mounds, using air pockets that drive natural ventilation, thus cooling the building with outside air. Considered the first building to use natural ventilation on this scale, the Eastgate Centre consumes a fraction of the energy that other buildings of this size do.

Then there’s the honeycomb, perhaps nature’s most efficient design, which is being incorporated into products like bicycle helmets and car bumpers. In fact, the latest tyres for US military vehicles are based on the honeycomb design and are capable of surviving an IED attack and keep chugging away.

The writer is a journalist.

Published in Dawn, June 5th, 2023