Here are the specifications:
·
The royal suite sited near the lobby – the king
and queen will be too busy mating (or how about laying 30,000 eggs per day?) to
enjoy the penthouse views.
·
The sky’s the limit but we’ll settle for 6 metres
max. with a convenient rooftop cemetery – the dead have got time for the view.
·
The design must incorporate arches, access
tunnels, chimneys, ventilation shafts, nursery and other chambers, complete
with insulation
·
Serviced by underground freeways
·
A fungal garden/sewerage treatment works to
process faeces for further digestion
·
The building materials available are limited to:
earth, saliva and excrement
Labour hire?
The Queen controls the castes by exuding the appropriate chemicals so that an army of workers will develop to totally focus on the tasks at hand: cleaning, maintenance, construction, hospitality, child-care, water supply and climate control. There will be no distractions like sex for these guys but they have one feature you should be aware of – they are virtually blind!
On-site security?
No problem. The Queen will also provide
soldiers armed with either powerful jaws or chemical weaponry to retard enemy
approaches.
Catering?
There’s
plenty of dead wood lying around and microscopic organisms in the gut will
assist in the digestion of cellulose.
Hang on… we forgot to give you the site plan.
We’re in the
tropics with its torrential rains and flooding and possibly inland with extreme
temperature variations. Among 2300 species of termite we find the Amitermes
meridionalis or magnetic termite, common in northern Australia. The blind workers
cleverly align the termite mound with magnetic north. Why? So that the flat sides capture the
minimum amount of mid-day heat from the sun!
Now that we’ve built such a magnificent edifice why would anyone want to
leave? Life goes on and every year, mature fertile alates swarm, all at the
same time, try to survive predators and establish a new colony after a brief
flight. The prospective new king follows his queen into a new nest where they
will shed their wings, establish quarters and start to breed their staff.
So who designed this incredibly multi-skilled creature, wrote its program,
and taught it: family planning, surveying, road building, construction,
defence, aviation and hi-tech recycling?...before we had any idea ourselves!
Acknowledgement: Samuel J. Hornsey
Photo credit: chennaipestcontrol.co.in
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