Meeting 1201 Minutes

Minutes from the 1201st Meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club

President Tianzhu Xiong called the 1201st meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club to order at 7:35 pm on Tuesday, January 14th, 2020 in MCZ 101.

Approx. 23 members and guests were in attendance.

Old business: Members are reminded to pay their dues.

Rook Zheng was confirmed for membership

New business:

Wendy Andrea Valencia Montoya and Brian Chan were nominated for membership.

Maria Aliberti Lubertazzi presented insect-themed artwork done by her students at the RI School of Design. The assignment was to develop graphic outreach to a particular group in the form of posters,
T-shirt designs, books or other format.

Our speaker was Dr. Justin Werfel, Senior Research Scientist at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. His talk was entitled “Mound-building termites and how they coordinate their work.”

Termites construct complex mounds that are orders of magnitude larger than any individual termite. The traditional understanding of how termites 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.

Justin described his work analyzing the behaviors of two closely related Namibian termites (genus Macrotermes), studying their responses to surface geometry, patterns of excavation, humidity, and other variables, and breaking them down into discrete actions to be implemented by simple robots. He also described nuances in the behavior of individual termites and reasons to question long held assumptions about termite mound construction. Concerning robots, he enumerated the advantages of “swarm” robots, capable of independent action and not subject to the vulnerabilities of centrally controlled robots.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:05 for discussion and refreshments.

Respectfully submitted, Andrea Golden, CEC Secretary