The Role of Environment, Material, and Regulatory Function in the Morphological Diversity of Termite Mounds

Most termites around the globe build massive structures that are of several orders of magnitudes larger than themselves. These superstructures, called termite mounds, passively regulate their internal environments and provide ideal living conditions for their residing termites. Termite mounds exhibit systematic structural designs that vary in size and shape among species and locations. While most previous efforts explored the regulatory functions of termite mounds, only a few studies investigated the physics behind their morphological diversity. To explain the different but systematic shapes of termite mounds, this work develops a computational model to investigate the connection between the mound’s structural form and the mounds’ local environment, material, and regulatory functions. Using the fundamentals of heat transfer, the model captures the main structural features observed in natural termite mounds. The influence of the environmental factors and mound function over the structural form is analyzed thoroughly. The proposed methodology can be extended to the prediction of the architecture of natural systems for which the structural and environmental information can be attained.