Biomimicry of Termite Social Cohesion and Design to Inspire and Create Sustainable Systems

Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a new discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems. The core idea of biomimicry as enunciated by the Biomimicry Institute (Anon 2008) is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Margulis (1998) considers that the major kinds of life on Earth are bacteria, protoctists, fungi, animals and plants. All have become the consummate survivors. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth. This is the real news of biomimicry: After 4 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. Termites have been experimenting for over 300 million years on our symbiotic planet and their current abundance and distribution attests to their co-evolutionary success