Underbug

Why do scientists, poets, and engineers keep returning to termites? Because they represent one of nature’s most astonishing paradoxes—millions of small, seemingly mindless creatures acting together to build elaborate homes, maintain environments, and even display collective intelligence. In Underbug, Lisa Margonelli uses the termite as her lens to explore a question that is both biological and philosophical: how does intelligence emerge from collectives?

The book moves between termite biology, robotics, genomics, and ethics, showing how the idea of the superorganism—a colony functioning as a single body—became both a scientific tool and a cultural metaphor. From Eugène Marais’s mystical “soul of the white ant” to E. O. Wilson’s formal models of ant evolution, Margonelli traces how the superorganism concept framed debates about cooperation, altruism, and evolution. It continues to invite excitement and caution: it is evocative science wrapped in social storytelling.

The rise, fall, and return of the superorganism

Early thinkers like William Wheeler and Marais saw colonies as new life forms—living bodies whose parts were specialized castes and whose mounds were organs. The metaphor inspired generations, linking social cohesion in insects with human political order. But after World War II, biology’s turn toward reductionism and genetic models—genes rather than colonies—made the superorganism seem unscientific. E. O. Wilson called it a poetic distraction. Yet Margonelli shows how, by the late twentieth century, new data on collective systems, robotics, and microbial communities revived it. The superorganism now serves as both guiding concept and warning label: useful, but never the final word.

The colony as a machine and computation

When Scott Turner studies termite mounds in Namibia, he describes them as living machines—architecture fused with physiology. You see how air flows, fungus gardens grow, and soil chemistry combine to create a system that regulates temperature and gas exchange. Margonelli’s reporting turns biology into systems thinking: each mound operates like a dynamic feedback machine, adjusting to environmental change through termite activity. It’s not magic, but an evolved computation of air, water, and heat—millions of movements that collectively approximate solar geometry and climate stability.

A bridge between natural and artificial collectives

The termite metaphor crosses disciplines. Roboticists such as Radhika Nagpal and Kirstin Petersen borrow termite-like principles—local signals, redundancy, and error tolerance—to design swarms of machines that can build without supervision. Their TERMES and Kilobot projects show how simple rules can yield coordinated results, while revealing that “decentralization” is not pure chaos: engineers must still sculpt the environment to make local rules produce global order. Margonelli uses these laboratories to compare biological and artificial systems, showing that our fascination with termites masks deeper desires to understand autonomy, cooperation, and the limits of control.

The scientific chorus

Margonelli blends science narratives—Turner’s mounds-as-minds, Hugenholtz’s metagenomic “jazz,” Keasling’s synthetic biology pipelines, and long-term ecological restoration—into a meditation on scale and interpretation. You move from microscopic symbioses in termite guts to kilometer-wide vegetation patterns shaped by mound spacing. In each case, complexity resists reduction: from genomes to landscapes, interactions matter more than blueprints.

The ethical mirror

Finally, Margonelli asks you to see how the termite becomes moral metaphor. Distributed decision-making, whether in mounds or drone swarms, reveals a tension between efficiency and empathy. Technologies inspired by insect cognition—from autonomous robots to AI weapon systems—test our capacity to retain human values in nonhuman forms of intelligence. Throughout the book, you learn that the termite is not just a scientific specimen—it is a mirror for how humans imagine intelligence, cooperation, and moral responsibility in complex worlds.

Scott Turner’s fieldwork in Namibia transforms how you see dirt. Termite mounds are not inert piles—they are dynamic, breathing workshops, constantly built and rebuilt by workers, fungus, and soil interactions. Margonelli describes Turner’s use of dyes, gas pumps, and backhoes to probe their structure and to watch termites restore order after destruction. You learn that these towers function like organisms, moving air and water, regulating temperature, and tuning themselves acoustically.

A composite metabolism

Macrotermes mounds host Termitomyces fungi that digest cellulose and return nutrients to termites. The fungus may contribute most of the metabolism, meaning that mound functionality emerges from multi-species coupling. Turner’s conclusions blur the line between ecology and physiology—the mound is neither single organism nor simple environment, but a coupled metabolic system.

Architecture as computation

Over time, mound forms align with celestial angles—capturing optimal light and ventilation geometry. This isn’t conscious design but emergent computation through thousands of termite actions. Margonelli connects this architectural intelligence to ideas in complex systems and distributed computation (like neural networks): feedback replaces planning.

The lesson for you

To grasp living architecture, think beyond metaphor. Turner’s mantra—“a termite isn’t, a termite does”—reminds you that identity lies in process. Mounds teach how structure arises from motion and cooperation, offering analogies for biological homeostasis and sustainable engineering where maintenance is built into the design itself.

Margonelli challenges the simplicity of classical swarm models. The older idea of stigmergy—where insects leave signals that trigger others to act—explains much but not all. Fieldwork by Scott Turner, Paul Bardunias, and Kirstin Petersen shows more complex behaviors: digging, arrestant cues, and crucially, individual variation.

Beyond the pheromone myth

Pierre-Paul Grassé proposed in 1959 that structures grow through positive feedback on pheromone-marked piles of soil. Later experiments overturn parts of this model. Termites seem recruited not just by chemical cues but by the act of digging itself—physical alteration triggers further action. A few individuals do most of the building; others wander or rest. That heterogeneity makes collective behavior flexible.

Robotic parallels

Robotic laboratories patterned on stigmergy discovered similar limits. TERMES and Kilobot systems require engineering scaffolds—striped blocks, taped floors—to make simple local rules work. Like termites, robots need context, variability, and the occasional leader to stabilize action. As Petersen’s research revealed, design must treat variability as functional, not as noise.

Key takeaway

Collective biology is neither random nor perfectly algorithmic. It is messy coordination among uneven actors. For engineers and ecologists alike, that means designing with diversity—allowing imperfect agents to improvise toward equilibrium rather than forcing identical precision from every unit.

Modern termite research roared into the genomic age when scientists like Phil Hugenholtz began sequencing whole gut communities. Margonelli’s account of the Joint Genome Institute team feels like watching improvisational musicians interpreting massive datasets. This is the new biology: information first, questions later.

The metagenomic revolution

Sequencing gut paste—billions of fragments of DNA—reveals thousands of microbial functions. The team found redundancy: many microbes perform similar tasks, ensuring stable digestion regardless of which species dominate. This functional convergence reframes evolution, emphasizing processes over identities.

The jazz of interpretation

Margonelli joins the scientists as they shout out patterns across screens, building provisional stories from probabilistic data. Interpretation becomes ensemble work—human creativity welded to computation. The analogy to jazz captures a key transformation: modern science no longer discovers neatly but improvises iteratively.

Lessons for knowledge

From these messy sessions emerge insights about microbial cooperation, evolution’s redundancy, and unexpected gifts like the CRISPR discovery. You learn that databases, not microscopes, now lead discovery—and that the future of biology requires both immense data and human narrative skill to turn noise into meaning.

Margonelli explores how the dream to make biology predictable collides with reality. Synthetic biology labs led by Jay Keasling and Héctor García Martín try to convert termite-inspired enzymology into commercial biofuels. Their success stories—artemisinin synthesis—sit beside failures that expose biology’s stubborn unpredictability.

From promise to frustration

Synthetic biology aims to design microbes like machines. But when you scale experiments from flasks to fermenters, microbes behave differently—oxygen gradients, stress responses, and unpredictable feedbacks alter productivity. Margonelli calls this the black box of life: living systems resist full control.

Data and standardization

Héctor García Martín treats metabolism as physics: measurable flows and fluxes. He pushes for quantitative, standardized biology, likening cells to combustion engines. Yet Margonelli reminds you that biological creativity thrives on mess—imperfect data still drive innovation.

Ethical and economic contexts

Every attempt to industrialize life raises governance questions. Like Haber-Bosch a century before, synthetic biology promises abundance and risk. Market forces, defense interests, and ecological impacts determine which ideas survive. Margonelli balances optimism with realism: predictive biology is possible only through decades of careful, ethical, and data-rich collaboration.

You finish with the recognition that engineering biology is both science and social contract—its success depends not just on circuits of enzymes but on transparency, responsibility, and foresight.

In the book’s concluding movements, Margonelli turns macro. You zoom out from the mound to whole landscapes and societies. Mathematicians Corina Tarnita and Rob Pringle reveal how termite spacing interacts with plant self-organization to produce resilient ecosystems—living geometry that prevents collapse in drylands. This is a new synthesis between biology and physics seen from the air.

Pattern and resilience

Termite mounds form regular hexagonal grids because of limited foraging overlap. Plants form Turing-type patches through competition and cooperation. When combined, these systems stabilize fertility and water flow, preventing catastrophic drought collapse. Margonelli shows pattern mathematics as ecological ethics: design for distributed stability, not centralized control.

Restoration and governance

The Gove bauxite rehabilitation in Arnhem Land exemplifies another kind of pattern—social cooperation. Restoration succeeded only when science respected Indigenous governance and ethics. Dieter Hinz’s horticultural practices and Yolngu elders’ vision produced living forests, proving that ecological engineering demands cultural consent.

Ethics of distributed intelligence

Finally, Margonelli extends termite metaphors to human technologies—drones and swarms. Scott Turner sees mounds as extended cognition; Mark Hagerott warns that military swarms may erode empathy. The termite thus becomes our ethical reflection: collective intelligence requires moral design as much as mechanical ingenuity.

The closing insight mirrors the beginning: understanding termites is learning to see systems—ecological, technological, and social—as living, moral designs. Complexity, when embraced with care, becomes not an obstacle but a guide to coexistence.