Sensing, Traffic, and Construction in Termites

Subterranean and mound-building termites excavate, transport, and build within the same granular substrate that later regulates how they sense, move, and deposit material.

From antennal-scale contacts through body-scale traffic to meter-scale architecture, this review synthesizes three linked problems: how workers sense local geometry and physical cues during search and excavation; how traffic moves through narrow, evolving conduits; and how excavation and deposition remodel the substrate that guides later behavior.

Across these length scales, noisy local interactions couple sensing, transport, and construction through a shared material medium, leading to emergent order at the colony scale.

We emphasize what is established experimentally, where evidence remains sparse or limited to a few model systems, and how emerging imaging, tracking, and modeling tools are making these feedbacks quantitatively accessible.

We use this synthesis to motivate a quantitative physics-of-life framework for termite colonies that continually rewrite the medium through which they sense, move, and build.