Tuesday, January 14, 7:30 pm – Mound-building Termites and How They Coordinate Their Work
The public is invited to attend the January meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club on Tuesday, January 14, at 7:30 pm at Harvard University, 26 Oxford Street MCZ 101. Dr. Justin Werfel, Senior Research Scientist at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, will present a talk entitled Mound-building Termites and How They Coordinate Their Work.
Termites construct complex mounds that are orders of magnitude larger than any individual and fulfill a variety of functional roles for the colony. The traditional understanding of how the insects organize their efforts focuses on stigmergy, a form of indirect communication in which actions change the environment and thereby provide cues that influence future work. Dr. Werfel will discuss studies that point to the importance of cues including surface geometry, active excavation, and humidity, but, surprisingly, show no role for the putative cement pheromone that has been central to the theory for six decades. There will also be robots!
Justin Werfel leads the Designing Emergence Laboratory. His research interests are in the understanding and design of complex and emergent systems, with work in areas including swarm robotics, social insect behavior, evolutionary theory, engineered molecular nanosystems, and educational technology. His work has been featured by numerous national and international media, highlighted among Science’s “top 10 scientific achievements of 2014”, and denounced by a former assistant secretary of the US Treasury as “an enemy of the human race.” (which to our mind is high praise) The meeting is free.
