Underbug
An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli, national bestselling author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, investigates the environmental and economic impact termites inflict on human societies in this fascinating examination of one of nature’s most misunderstood insects.
Are we more like termites than we ever imagined? In Underbug, the award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli introduces us to the enigmatic creatures that collectively outweigh human beings ten to one and consume $40 billion worth of valuable stuff annually—and yet, in Margonelli’s telling, seem weirdly familiar. Over the course of a decade-long obsession with the little bugs, Margonelli pokes around termite mounds and high-tech research facilities, closely watching biologists, roboticists, and geneticists. Her globe-trotting journey veers into uncharted territory, from evolutionary theory to Edwardian science literature to the military industrial complex. What begins as a natural history of the termite becomes a personal exploration of the unnatural future we’re building, with darker observations on power, technology, historical trauma, and the limits of human cognition.
Whether in Namibia or Cambridge, Arizona or Australia, Margonelli turns up astounding facts and raises provocative questions. Is a termite an individual or a unit of a superorganism? Can we harness the termite’s properties to change the world? If we build termite-like swarming robots, will they inevitably destroy us? Is it possible to think without having a mind? Underbug burrows into these questions and many others—unearthing disquieting answers about the world’s most underrated insect and what it means to be human.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Termites, a group of insects closely related to cockroaches and responsible for up to $20 billion in property damage in the United States each year, make for an unlikely but fascinating protagonist in the capable and creative hands of science journalist Margonelli (Oil on the Brain). She uses the termite taxonomy as a way to address questions with "evolutionary, ecological and existential implications." Her far-ranging work touches on the nature of individuality, the use of drones by the military, the applicability of concepts of good and evil to science, and the creation of biofuels created using the termite gut, among other topics. Margonelli brings all of this to light by making complex, cutting-edge science understandable to the general reader, while also conveying the excitement, frustration, and plain drudgery inherent in the scientific endeavor. She provides firsthand descriptions of field and laboratory work throughout the world, from Cambridge, Mass., to Windhoek, Namibia, coupled with interviews of scientists involved in exploring the intricacies and implications of termite behavior. The range of disciplines represented by these researchers (entomology, physiology, genomics, physics, robotics) by itself ably demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of current research on termites. Margonelli has written a book as entertaining as it is informative.
