Typical nest architectures that emerge from the termites’ construction behavior
Procornitermes araujoi nests have a rather simple architecture with an underground chamber and tunnel network, and an above ground mound with many small interconnected chambers.
How to detect soil pellet transports, an example construction experiment and the associated data set
This video is an extract of an experiment where the termites Procornitermes araujoi build a shelter after releasing them in a new, shelter-less environment. It shows how an observer can identify the sequence "picking up a pellet, transport, deposition" by first detecting the deposition site by the termites typical head screwing movement (yellow circle appears in the movie), then rewinding the video in order to detect the picking up location (second appearance of the yellow circle) and the transport path. It’s tedious, but it works ;-)
Movie of one of the experiments analyzed in the paper, with the resulting data file (feel free to re-analyze). To reduce the movie size the film has been re-encoded with a resolution of 480x270 instead of the original 960x540, the coordinates in the data filetherefore have to be divided by two in order to find the same position in the movie.