In the natural world,
you need to be smart...
..to stay alive.
But we're only just discovering that some animals are brighter
than we ever imagined.
I've never failed to be impressed by nature's sheer ingenuity.
Now, brand-new science using innovative techniques and the latest
technology is revealing some surprising brainboxes.
You can get bees to learn almost anything.
Researchers across the globe... THEY LAUGH
..are uncovering the mind-blowing tricks...
..and clever strategies that give certain species the upper hand.
It is an animal showcasing its intelligence in front of your eyes.
As they build their homes...
..navigate their world...
..and raise their young.
It's time to get inside the minds of nature's savviest species.
But, I warn you, there's going to be a few surprises
and some controversial candidates.
But, most importantly, it's going to give us an opportunity to learn
from these animal Einsteins
and that's really exciting.
In this programme, I'll be looking at the brilliant brains behind some
of nature's best builders.
We'll discover how beaver dams beat our engineering,
how a spider constructs an underwater survival solution,
and how the foundations of our own intelligence lie
in apes building nests.
So, just how good are Mother Nature's ingenious animal architects?
This is the Meldon dam in Devon, an impressive structure
that dominates the landscape here and holds back millions
of gallons of one of our most precious resources, water.
But when it comes to modifying the landscape to suit our needs,
we're not the only ones doing it with dams.
Ladies and gentlemen, and young people,
I give you the beaver.
These supersized semi-aquatic rodents are the only animals
other than humans to build dams
and they do it for exactly the same reason -
to hold back water.
Beavers skilfully block streams and rivers, creating vast ponds
that help keep them safe from land predators and store food underwater
to see them through harsh winters.
They even sleep and raise young in these ponds,
constructing ultra strong lodges that can only be accessed
by underwater entrances.
A fortress for the family.
But it's their dams that are the most impressive structures,
transforming the whole landscape, and they can be huge.
I can tell you, for instance, that the longest beaver dam
in the world, at over 850 metres, is four times longer than the dam
I was standing on earlier - and so big it can be seen from space.
That's an incredible feat of engineering
and it's not only the size that's remarkable.
To help evade predators, beavers are largely nocturnal,
so they're building these structures
in almost complete darkness, using natural materials
with no plans and no training at all.
Amazing.
But we, too, build dams.
And, with thousands of years of experience,
we're getting quite good at it.
Nevertheless, beavers have been building for millions of years
and, over that time, they've picked up some pretty crafty
construction techniques of their own.
Recent research on beaver dams has shown that the upstream slope
beneath the water is a lot shallower than the downstream slope,
meaning that they can hold back considerably more water,
something that I can demonstrate using this pair of doorstops.
Now, if the beavers got it wrong and built their dam with a sheer face
upstream, let's imagine that the door represents the weight
of the water in the lake.
If the mass of water is greater than the mass of the dam,
then it's easily shifted by that water.
However, the beavers don't do that, do they?
They have the shallow slope on their dams.
And this means that, when the weight of the water meets the dam,
the vertical forces pressing down outweigh the horizontal forces
of the water pressing downstream and the dam is immovable.
In the real world of the beaver,
as the horizontal forces of the water meet the dam,
they become vertical and pin that dam to the base of the lake -
and that's how it can hold back a lot more water.
Whilst we haven't copied beaver dam building, human engineers
have plumped for some of the same solutions.
Just like the beavers, we also bow our dams upstream, a proven way
of engineering these structures to be strong
and incredibly long-lasting.
So long-lasting, in fact, that beaver dams marked up on maps
of North America from 1868 can still be found in use today.
Using sticks, stones, rocks, and mud,
these structures are clearly built to last.
So just how do these master builders do it and what can we learn
from beaver engineering expertise?
Beavers really are the ones which,
in our field of hydraulic engineering,
provide by far the most interesting
and the most far reaching solution to problems.
Dr Gerald Muller is an engineer convinced that, when it comes
to the dams of the future, taking a log out
of the beaver construction manual is a very sensible approach.
Beaver dams are very interesting from the point of view
that, A, they are very strong and, B, you use natural material
which is available everywhere, which is quite cheap.
It also is a nature-based solution
where we can re-use the material easily.
If you would build a dam from reinforced concrete
and you want to take it away, you need to get the jackhammer out
and hammer it apart and you are left with some steel and a pile of rubble
which cannot really be reused.
And, from that point of view, a solution like this is really
very near ideal, I must say.
In short, the natural materials beavers use, like stones, wood,
and mud, have an extremely small carbon pawprint.
How good are they, though, at the job of retaining water?
So, this is an experiment we designed to find out how strong
beaver dams actually are.
In the first experiment, Gerald sets up a dam using just rocks.
By subjecting this structure to a simulated flood event,
Gerald is able to measure the rock dam's strength.
And I need to make a quick mark of the water level
to make sure that we capture the maximum water level
because, otherwise, it will, of course, drop and we don't have
a record of the...of the maximum level.
Whilst the height of the water gives an indication of the pressures
the dam can withstand, the real measure of any dam
is how long it stays up.
Gerald's rock-only dam is soon undermined
and, within just five minutes, it begins to collapse.
So, now you can see what happened to our rubble-only dam
after a while in the high flood.
It has lost about two centimetres in height,
but also about two thirds of its mass.
It's just a pile of rubble, really, and the material gets washed away
and deposited somewhere downstream.
It turns out that simple piles of rocks are not very effective.
Reassuringly, though, beaver builders are a little more creative.
In the wild, they're often observed going to great lengths sourcing
all sorts of materials to put into their dams, even digging canals
to help them float larger logs straight to the site.
But is all of that effort worth it?
The beavers are building their dams with rock
and with branches and wood,
so that's what we're doing in this experiment. We're combining
both materials and we put in the rocks first,
and then a layer of branches.
Could Gerald prove that, by choosing to combine materials,
beavers were actually building stronger dams?
Time for the next flood.
How would the beavers' design compare
to Gerald's first dam using just rocks?
We have this difference in water level, so we've got more than twice
the difference and that means more than three times the flow volume
for the twig and rock dam.
And you can see here the dam is stable.
So, overall, I would say that it's a success.
This dam is much stronger than the dam without reinforcement.
Beaver dams might look chaotic,
but the combination of materials they put together makes
perfect structural sense.
Adding branches to the rock dam means you add
what we call tensile strength -
that is the strength against pulling something apart to the structure -
that increases the strength of the structure enormously.
In engineering, this technique is actually known.
There's a construction technique called reinforced earth,
which uses the same principle but that was only discovered
in the 1920s, I think, whereas the beavers have used it
for millions of years.
Brilliant engineers with an evolved understanding of material physics.
Beavers can clearly teach us a lot when it comes to dam building.
And they've also evolved the perfect tools for the job.
Take a look at this.
This is a beaver skull.
It's absolutely fantastic.
What I want to show you are its incisors here, its teeth.
Firstly, look, they're bright orange, and that's
because the enamel on the outside is filled full of iron oxide,
a really tough compound.
And they're self-sharpening, too. As they chew the word,
the soft dentin at the back is worn away,
leaving this cutting edge here very, very sharp.
And there's a clear parallel between the way that they sharpen
their teeth and we sharpen our chisels.
When you think about it, we sharpen this edge here,
leaving the cutting edge equally sharp.
And when you look at it, the profile's exactly the same, too.
It's easy to see why, given the teeth and the brain
that we've got here, that we should be celebrating the beaver
as one of the greatest builders in the natural world.
But now, having said that, the beaver brings its tools
to the construction.
What about if you had an animal
that also brought its own materials at the same time?
Now, that really would be something.
There's one animal that supplies a complete design-and-build package.
Yes, if your spider sense is tingling, so is mine.
There are more than 48,000 known species of spider found
on every continent apart from Antarctica...
..and in many diverse habitats - from desert to jungle
and even in our own homes.
Almost all species are predators and they hunt using a wide range
of strategies - from chasing their prey to lassoing it
and, most familiar to us all, building webs
to catch their food in flight.
And although not all spiders build webs, every species produces silk.
And should you choose to study one of the strongest and toughest
natural materials on the planet,
you'll need a hands-on approach with spiders.
Right, so maybe I can invite you
into our arachnarium, our spider room.
I hope you're not arachnophobes -
then you should stay outside.
But, if you're not, please come in.
Professor Fritz Vollrath is a scientist
at the Oxford University Silk Group.
These are the spiders that we study for the silk.
These are big golden orb spiders,
and this one has just been silked and I'm putting her back.
She's doesn't want to let go.
She loves me, look at that.
The spider is the only animal really that makes something out of itself.
So, the web is an extension of the body of the animal,
but it's built out of apparently nothing,
out of the silk that is inside the spider.
The spiders were about the first animals on land,
so about 400 million years ago,
the insects came a little bit later,
and they came on land already with a silk-like material.
First they used the silk to wallpaper, as it were,
actual burrows when there was a flooding.
And then the silk evolved into a trap that could not only inform
the spider about insects wandering about,
but also hold these insects firm for a while.
It's a highly evolved material
and that, of course, is still evolving
in this arms race with the insects.
Yet here is the really clever bit.
Where a silk worm can only produce one silk,
spiders can make up to seven different types,
each one crafted for a specific task.
In building terms, it's like having the ability to produce bricks,
concrete, rafters, and fixtures and fittings
all out of your backside.
It's an unmatched ability in the animal kingdom,
but the real genius is that spiders know how to build
with these materials effectively.
Just take a look at how cleverly they combine silks
when building an orb web.
To start with, spiders always use their toughest silk
on the spokes and radial strands.
These will form the framework on which the structure will hang.
A special silk then circles the centre.
Onto this, a skeleton silk is added -
effectively, scaffolding that holds the spokes in place -
and it's removed when the web is completed.
Only when this solid framework is firmly in place
can the spider attach its key material - capture silk.
It's these extra sticky strands with built-in shock absorbers
that allow orb webs to both catch and hold their prey.
You can imagine that this is an anti-weapon device, basically.
Flying insects are, in effect, bullets.
They come with a really huge amount of kinetic energy
and they hit the web and the web must stop it,
and not fling it back out - so it can't act as a trampoline.
Or, to put it another way...
Imagine you were a spider the size of a human
and you were to make a web like the spider does -
it would be the size of a cricket pitch.
And, in terms of strength from the material,
it would be able to catch small airplanes.
So, that, if you just think about that, that's really interesting.
You have to admit, Fritz certainly has a point.
Spiders build a huge variety of structures,
but it's the superlative skills of the 3,000 species of orb web spider
that have really captured our imagination.
With thousands to choose from, it's hard to pick a favourite,
but there's one that I think deserves a special mention.
Just look at this beautiful animal.
This is one of the 11 species of Nephila spider.
They're tropical animals and they make the most remarkable webs,
but what they're really after is a range of quite large prey.
They make huge webs, some sticky, some just acting as baffles
to channel the prey into those sticky bits.
And they can feed on small snakes and even small birds, too.
They are remarkable animals and they do make remarkable webs.
But, of course, they're making them on the surface.
There is another species of spider which I think trumps them
because it makes its web beneath the water.
It's the diving bell spider.
When life got too tough up top, this species built itself
a brilliant solution.
Diving bell spiders live almost completely underwater
by weaving a special sac filled with trapped air.
The thread frame they used to build this diving bell is then covered
in gel-like sheets of silk, keeping air bubbles trapped, but also
allowing oxygen and carbon dioxide to diffuse into the chamber,
letting the spider breathe.
It's genius.
You could say this spider has built artificial gills,
something no other animal has achieved, including us humans.
Other animals, though, have taken a far simpler approach
to keeping themselves out of harm's way.
They don't dive - they dig.
The world presents many threats to animals
and, the more of these that can be mitigated, the more successful
that animal will be.
Digging a simple hole allows you to stay safe from predators.
You can keep your young protected, store food,
and protect yourself from the weather.
To see a top digger in action, let's head to the vast grasslands
of North America, home of the prairie dog.
Out here, there's plenty for them to munch on -
but they have to share this perfect pasture with a host of predators
whose preferred source of protein...
..is prairie dog.
With very little cover above ground to conceal them,
the only way to get themselves out of a jam is to go underground,
building themselves to safety.
Down here, dozens of entrances and exits provide every chance
of a getaway from dangers above and below the surface.
Other holes are built as listening posts,
vital early warning from any unseen dangers lurking above.
Yes, self-preservation is clearly a priority for these guys...
..but prairie dogs have also been sensible enough to engineer in
a few all-important creature comforts.
Prairie dogs -
what do they have in common with the designers of this building?
Well, interestingly, it's chimneys.
We want chimneys in our houses to vent the smoke from our fires.
The prairie dogs, on the other hand, need a system of air conditioning
to get fresh air into their tunnels.
But how do they achieve it?
Well, they use some physics.
A fellow called Daniel Bernoulli published a book
called Hydrodynamica in 1738, in which he outlined his principle.
On this simple diagram, I can show you that air moves more slowly
when it's close to the ground and faster
when it's a few metres above the ground.
Here, it generates a lower pressure over the entrance to any tube
than the air at ground level,
thus the difference in pressure draws air through the tube.
But you do need a difference in height.
So, if you're a prairie dog, you've got to build yourself a chimney.
You've got to build yourself a mound.
And that's exactly what they do to effect an enormously efficient
system of air conditioning, which brings brilliant fresh air
into their extensive prairie dog cities on the plains
of North America.
Now, I don't have a say in the matter, but, if I did, I'd give
these prairie dogs the Nobel Prize for physics.
Nobel Prize pending, prairie dogs' burrow building has certainly
been key to their success as a species, providing ample
opportunity for escape and a comfortable life underground.
Colonies can number thousands of individuals.
However, as successful as prairie dogs' holes have made them,
they still have to risk returning to the surface for food.
But over in East Africa lives the king of concealment -
an expert tunneller who's perfected the art
of staying out of harm's way.
Ladies and gentlemen, one of the brightest builders on the block,
the naked mole-rat.
Naked mole-rats accrue in the hot, arid regions of East Africa,
in countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia.
Above ground, these virtually-blind, hairless creatures
wouldn't last five minutes, but the clever burrow systems they build
has allowed them to live in a challenging environment
where many other mammals struggle.
Groups excavate miles of tunnels and connecting chambers
within the burrow, each with a purpose - such as sleeping,
breeding, and eating.
They even designate a toilet room.
In essence, they built a bunker, a refuge from predators and a shelter
from harsh weather that's capable of sustaining not just small families,
but huge colonies of hundreds of individuals all year round.
Few mammals' survival is so completely entwined with its home,
so looking after them in captivity can be quite a challenge.
I've been caring for naked mole-rats for around three to four years now.
Paige Bwye is the mole-rat keeper at Bristol Zoo.
They're definitely different to all the other mammals
that I look after here.
Because they live completely underground,
it makes how we care for them very different.
To a naked mole-rat, excavating is everything.
With a quarter of its muscle mass in its jaws,
and teeth that protrude in front of its lips
so dirt doesn't get in its mouth,
they are perfectly evolved to shift soil.
And, here at the zoo, they've found a clever way to keep these burrow
builders doing just what they do best in the wild.
We know they spend a lot of time digging,
so one thing that we've created is an artificial sand hopper
and what we do is we fill up these boxes here with sand,
just like so...
This sends out a signal to all the naked mole-rats.
Wherever they are, they seem to realise
what's going on straight away...
..that either a tunnel has collapsed or it's a new area that they haven't
explored before, and it might have some novel scents on it.
So, they'll come straight in and they'll start digging
at this new area.
To look at the naked mole-rats,
they look like quite a vulnerable mammal, really -
the fact that they have no hair,
they've got quite poor eyesight, they're so small.
But, actually, it makes them perfectly designed
for living underground.
Never having to leave its home means that mole-rats
are one of the few species that have evolved
to inhabit an environment they themselves have created.
Biologically, they've become uniquely adapted
to living underground.
They don't actually require a lot of food at all from us.
And we, in comparison, would feed another rodent group -
so our mice or rats - four times the amount of food
and that's because these guys have a really low metabolic rate.
So, they don't need the same amount of energy as another type of rodent
and that's because they actually dig their burrows in the perfect
position from the sun to help regulate their body temperature.
When it comes to tunnelling, naked mole-rats know pretty much every
trick in the trade.
The bunkers they build are truly brilliant.
As a measure of their success,
consider that, down here, these animals live for up to 30 years,
decades longer than a rodent of similar size on the surface.
For naked mole-rats, going underground might have been the best
decision they ever made.
These guys are super intelligent in terms of their social structures.
Considering they're small mammals that live in a hole in the ground,
they're incredibly complex.
Digging holes underground is an intensely practical
and successful way of building yourself out of trouble,
but it's not very visually appealing, is it?
You see, in the human world, architecture is all about artistic
expression and aesthetic appeal as it is form and function.
Just look at the roof on this building - that green roof,
the way it melds into the environment here.
Amazing.
But there are other animals that are interested in aesthetics, too -
particularly when it comes to finding a mate -
then they have to craft things of exquisite beauty.
Making a home with a partner is never a straightforward business...
..and, deep in the forest of New Guinea, one bird
has really got his work cut out.
This incredible structure is the creation of a Vogelkop bowerbird -
a male one, to be precise - and it's not a house
but one of very few structures in the animal kingdom built
to attract females,
a unique building designed entirely for mating purposes.
Vogelkop bowerbirds build maypole bowers, elaborate structures
up to two metres across that can take ten months to build
and years to perfect.
Once constructed, the birds decorate.
Moss lines the floor and bowers are adorned with an array of sculptural
and colourful ornaments.
Vogelkops are one of around 20 bowerbird species that build
a variety of architecturally elaborate structures
to attract a mate,
and the skill, and the attention to detail
the birds display, is remarkable.
But, when it comes to attracting certain female bowerbirds,
a good-looking bower will only get you so far.
Let's take a short hop over the water,
from New Guinea to mainland Australia...
..where another bowerbird species is capable of building
an optical illusion that tricks females into becoming their mates.
I've been baking.
If you believe that, you'll believe anything,
but I do like cakes.
Look at these two cupcakes that we've got here.
Forced perspective is a type of optical illusion
that can make objects seem bigger, smaller, closer or further away.
It's a visual manipulation between scaled objects
and the correlation of their position
relative to the spectator, which sounds very, very complicated.
What it means is that we can make small things, like this cupcake,
look as large as large things,
like this cupcake.
Pretty clever.
But then we are not the only species practising this trick, are we?
It's exactly what these great bowerbirds are doing.
When they create their bower, they make a courtyard outside,
called the gesso, normally out of small, white stones,
and they deliberately choose to put the smaller stones
closer to the exit of the bower,
and the larger stones further away,
generating that form of forced perspective.
They tempt the female into the bower.
She stops at a very particular spot,
and then the male dashes to one side and throws objects
across this screen that he's made to titillate her -
and it does. It visually stimulates her,
and the longer she stays in that bower, the greater the chance
he has of mating with her.
What about that?
If you thought we were being clever with these cupcakes,
you've got to take your hat off to the bowerbird.
By building a stage for his performance,
the male great bowerbird effectively cons females into mating with him
and, after falling for his trick,
it's the female bowerbirds that end up building the nest.
Birds' nests are probably one of the most recognised
built animal structures on the planet
and, when it comes to studying them, we're truly spoilt for choice.
As one of the widest-ranging groups of animals,
birds are also the most versatile and varied of builders.
Birds build nests in virtually every habitat they occupy.
When a new island arises from the sea,
they're the first on the scene.
In some places, they're the only animals to live and breed there.
The sheer diversity of structures they build is astonishing
and attention to detail staggering.
Yes, when compared to treehouses we build,
birds really do put us to shame.
There's no doubt, I suppose, that the very best
of the arboreal architects are birds and their nest.
This beautiful little cup was woven by a goldfinch
and you can see it's used twigs to make the initial part of that cup.
It's then lined it with hair
and finally sheep's wool,
then it's covered the outside with moss to camouflage it.
It's exquisite.
But what can a beautiful bird's nest like this tell us
about the intelligence of the animal that builds it?
We're talking now about animals that have a bill and feet,
and they are building structures that sometimes look
remarkably like something a human might have made.
Professor Sue Healy is convinced
the bird brains behind these structures
have to perform some quite complex decision-making.
I think nest building poses a bunch of problems for the builder.
The bird has to decide what is an appropriate place,
and is that in a bush, in a tree, on the ground?
Then it has to find appropriate materials.
How does it know what materials are appropriate?
Then it has to be able to transport those materials,
so they can't be too heavy, for example.
Then the animal has to put them together and end up with a structure
into which either they, or their partner, can lay eggs
and the eggs won't fall out.
Incredibly, whatever the shape,
material or location of the nest, each one is expertly designed
and built to safely incubate eggs
and eventually house chicks.
So, is this all done simply by instinct,
or do birds learn on the job?
Working with zebra finches in experimental conditions,
Sue had already established a link
between the amount of building material used in a nest
and the success the parents then had in raising chicks.
Birds that had built a successful nest first time
built the same nest when they built their second nest.
Birds that had not been successful with their first nest
put more material into their second nest.
And that gives us an insight into the finch's brain.
This is evidence that birds learn and remember their own experiences,
and use that information to make then later decisions.
Proving birds were learning to build better nests was a revelation.
So Sue carried out a second test to find out if birds preferred
to use one material over another.
In the wild, birds build with everything,
from mud, to sticks, to grass,
and even their own spit,
and often nests are superbly camouflaged,
so Sue devised a clever experiment to see if birds could be flexible
in their choice of building material.
So we went to the lab,
again, with zebra finches,
and we asked zebra finches to build in their cages.
Then we papered the wall of their cage and the box that they build in
a particular colour
and then we gave our zebra finches paper that was of the same colour
as the wallpaper in their cage,
and paper that was of a different colour.
And the birds didn't disappoint.
In almost every case, the birds decided to build their nests
out of materials that matched the colour of the nest box.
Sue had provided some of the very first experimental evidence
that birds were building with materials
specifically to match their surroundings
and that nest building isn't simply hard-wired.
So, although there will be a considerable genetic component
to nest building in birds,
increasingly we have evidence
that almost all aspects of building
comes from their own experience
and nest building is heavily dependent
on the bird's cognitive abilities.
Sue's work is fascinating.
Confirmation, if it were needed,
that nests are deceptively complex structures,
but also that the architects behind them
are far from the bird brains we once took them for.
Her findings certainly cast a new light
on one of my favourites.
This is the nest that belonged to a pair of long-tailed tits
and, unbelievably, it's woven out of spider silk.
You see, they will lay ten or more eggs inside the nest
and, when their young are growing, they increase in volume,
and this nest is flexible, it's pliable,
so it expands to cope with all of those young birds inside,
and, to keep those eggs warm, and the youngsters warm,
it's also lined with sometimes more than a thousand feathers
that these birds find in their environment.
They cover the outside, using that sticky spider silk,
with moss, and also lichen, so that, when the nest is pressed
up against a tree, or hidden in a bush,
it's almost completely camouflaged.
What a remarkable thing that is.
Remarkable, although you might say, in some ways,
maybe a little bit tatty at the same time.
But then there are other species of animals that produce their homes
with architectural, even mathematical, precision.
When you're constructing in the human world,
precision is everything.
Being out by a fraction of a centimetre,
as any budding DIY enthusiast can testify, can be...
..disastrous.
For bees, however, pinpoint precision comes naturally.
You probably know that bees build using hexagonal cells
to form honeycomb.
The cells are mostly built horizontally, along the long axis.
The top and bottom remain parallel.
But what's really clever is that, to prevent honey spillage,
the bees engineer the cells to pitch between nine and 14 degrees.
As natural masters of geometry,
bees can replicate this design
to within half a millimetre of accuracy
thousands and thousands and thousands of times.
What's more, the wax the bees use to build these cells
is antibacterial, antifungal and waterproof.
As building materials go,
beeswax is the bee's knees.
Not only that, but the shape of the bees' cells
measures up perfectly, too.
As well as being spatially efficient,
hexagonal honeycomb is also materially efficient.
This is something that's known as "the honeycomb conjecture",
a phenomena that's been recognised for thousands of years
but was only proved mathematically as recently as 1999 -
and it's all to do with spatial and material efficiency.
Now, imagine you're a bee
and you want to pack as many cells into your nest as you possibly can.
Well, you wouldn't go down the circular route, would you?
Look at all this dead space in-between them here.
Basically, you're left with three choices.
You can use squares, triangles,
or, as the bees have done,
you can go for those hexagons.
Now, no good builder wants to waste money on materials
they're not going to use
and it turns out that bees have had it right all along.
They can use the minimum amount of materials
to create the maximum number of cells in any given volume
using hexagons to store their honey.
Remarkable.
Discovering Mother Nature was building more efficiently
has meant we've been quick to steal her best ideas
and claim them as our own.
This is the Eden Project in Cornwall.
Here, designers have opted for the same hexagons as the bees,
making this building not only beautiful
but also materially efficient
in that the air contained within it weighs about the same
as the structure itself.
Stealing ideas from nature
and using them in buildings of our own is nothing new,
we've been doing it for centuries,
but it's only recently,
where new technology has allowed us to look at nature
in intricate detail, that we've realised
just how ingenious animal builders are.
So, rather than call it stealing,
we prefer to call our copycat construction "biomimicry".
Biomimicry is essentially a design inspired by nature,
so it's looking at solutions in the natural world
and learning from those to design better buildings,
better cities, better products.
Michael Pawlyn is one of the team that designed the Eden Project.
For him, the natural world has plenty more ideas out there
for us to plunder.
You could look at nature as like a design source book,
in which all the products have benefited from a 3.5-billion-year
research and development period
and, to make things even better, all the faulty products
have been withdrawn from the marketplace.
And, of course, what I'm referring to is this long and ruthless process
of evolution that has resulted in some really amazing solutions
amongst the plants and animals and other organisms that exist today.
When you're designing a building, there are lots of functional
challenges that you are trying to address.
You're trying to make an efficient, beautiful structure,
you're trying to use fewer material resources,
you're trying to keep warm and cool,
sometimes you're trying to harvest water,
and, for all of those,
you can find an amazing array of existing solutions in biology,
and, often, you can learn from those to design better solutions
that do that far better than we've ever done them before.
With the environmental impact of building now at the forefront
of many designers' minds,
looking to nature for solutions has never been more important...
..and inspiration can come from pretty much anywhere.
The world is literally an architect's oyster,
or, in this case, abalone shell.
We know, from the microstructure of abalone,
that it's made out of very thin layers of tiles,
essentially, that are built up, and, at a chemical level,
that is almost identical to ordinary blackboard chalk.
But, because of the microstructure,
it achieves roughly 3,000 times the strength,
and we've learned from that to design a house.
So this is an early concept model of the abalone house
that we're working on.
We've learned from the curved forms of shells to make that a stiff form.
So this is going to be built out of very thin layers of tiles,
and, by doing that, we can design a house
that uses about half the amount of materials of a conventional house.
This is just one of my favourite examples. This is a glass sponge
and this animal has evolved to make these wonderfully elegant structures
out of glass fibre
and, if you look at this under a magnifying glass, you can see
that it's incredibly elegant, you know,
these really, really thin fibres, and then cross-bracing.
It's like the most elegant bit of engineering you've ever seen,
and, as architects, you know, we could learn from examples
like this to design buildings that are just far more lightweight,
far more efficient, and, I think, far more beautiful.
The Davies Alpine House, here at Kew Gardens,
might look as futuristic as it gets for a greenhouse.
Nonetheless, inspiration for its design actually came from
ideas perfected in nature
long before humans were even on the scene.
So, here we are, in the Alpine House at Kew Gardens,
and Alpine plants need a lot of light.
They also need to be cool.
Now, obviously, you could do that by just using loads of energy
and air conditioning,
but what I love about biomimicry is that it points to
much more ingenious ways of solving those problems,
and, here, the architects and engineers studied termites.
Termites worked this out thousands of years ago.
Their mounds extend down into the ground
and they benefit from the steady temperature below the ground.
That's exactly what's going on here.
So, you can see these pipes.
Those are drawing cool air up from the basement,
which is like a labyrinth of walls,
and that's what keeps the building cool.
So it's controlling the temperature,
but with an absolute fraction of the energy of conventional approaches.
Yes, biomimicry has a lot to offer
and termites alone are turning out to be a mine of inspiration.
Up to 3,000 species of termites are found
on all continents except Antarctica.
Interestingly, not all of them build towers,
but, in the hot savannahs of Africa, and prairies of Asia and Australia,
these structures can be found in their millions.
The relative scale of these constructions is jaw-dropping.
In proportion to humans,
these tiny animals are building structures that are over four times
the height of our tallest ever skyscraper,
the Burj Khalifa in Dubai,
and, remember, they're doing this with no plans,
using nothing other than mud and water.
Termites build big and now there are some brand-new theories
on the functions of these colossal towers,
and, to help me explain one of them, I need a goat.
Yep, I'm not kidding.
Like most species of animals, termites breathe...
..utilising oxygen, and producing CO2,
but, in the case of these insects living in a large colony,
it's not just the individuals that are breathing,
or that colony of insects, it's their food, too,
because many species of termite farm fungus.
They feed it grass and other organic material,
and it respires, producing a huge quantity of CO2,
enough to suffocate the entire colony,
and what scientists have actually learned
is that the average termite colony respires the same amount
in every day as a goat.
I know it's a pretty arbitrary measurement,
but it's allegedly true.
What's remarkable is that this inert body, the mound,
can exchange that CO2 stale air, from the bottom of the colony,
with nice, fresh, oxygen-rich air at the top.
It's not only keeping those termites cool,
it's acting as their lungs.
It's actually breathing for them, which is fantastic.
With air purification, temperature control,
and no doubt many other built-in mound functions
waiting to be discovered,
termites are undoubtedly
one of the most accomplished animal builders out there.
As far as brilliant builders go,
it's going to take a lot to top a termite.
All of the animals we've featured so far are there on merit
and, I have to say, I'm not surprised scientists,
engineers and architects are now looking to nature for inspiration.
But we mustn't overlook our own building prowess,
and, unsurprisingly, our brains have given us a head start.
There's a compelling argument to be made that humans are the most
intelligent of all builders and, when you think about it,
we put up the largest artificial structures,
both on and off of our planet.
And even the simplest buildings allowed us to move away
from the plains of Africa, where we evolved,
and dwell in the most inhospitable parts of the planet.
So what gave us the increased intelligence to build better?
Well, the key is sleep,
or at least it will be,
if I can get to grips with this particularly intelligent building.
I've never been fond of hammocks, I've got to say.
Oh! Oh, my goodness me.
Oh!
HE SIGHS
For us, a good night's kip often boils down to the beds we sleep in
and we are not the only animals building structures for a snooze.
Well, one of the primary challenges of any organism on this planet
is to be able to figure out how to sleep safely and comfortably,
because sleep inherently is a very vulnerable activity.
When you're asleep, you're vulnerable to predation,
you're vulnerable to inclement weather,
you're vulnerable to lots of different challenges
in your environment.
David Samson is a professor,
studying the influence sleep has had
on the evolution of human intelligence.
He believes that sleeping platforms
built by some of our closest living relatives
might hold a vital clue
to explaining our own advanced building ability.
Great apes, bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans,
they build what's called a nest -
these are essentially tree beds - and no other primate does this.
Even large-bodied monkeys or large-brained monkeys,
they'll all sleep prostrate out on a tree.
Great apes will climb up 12, 13 metres into the canopy
and they will physically manipulate a sleeping environment
by breaking a few frame-supporting branches together,
interweaving them, in a way that allows for them
to have safe, secure sleep up in the canopy.
Though they're called nests, these structures
are more like hammocks and constructing one strong enough
to support 100kg of great ape is no mean feat...
..yet this is something most great apes will do every night.
Building a bed to sleep in really is environmental problem solving
of the highest order.
Being up off the forest floor not only keeps apes safe from predators,
but it's been proven to keep them warmer and even stave off insects.
Their structures are almost as complex as a shelter
a human might make.
The apes know how the wood is going to break
and they understand how strong the bed needs to be.
Interestingly, they even have a preference for building
with certain tree species.
They are clearly intelligently built,
but it's the brain-boosting capabilities
of these sleeping platforms that really gets David excited.
I would say that there is a baseline level of intelligence
required to build the nest, but I think the more important question
is - does it permit greater intelligence?
And I think the answer to that is actually yes.
These sleeping platforms allow the great apes to go in this deep,
high-quality sleep that then primes them
to face the ecological challenges of the next day,
so I really do think it augments their intelligence
in a way that is rather surprising.
After years of studying these animals building in the wild,
could David prove his theory that makeshift beds built
by great apes were actually making them brainier?
Orangutans are known to construct the most complex sleeping platforms,
packed full of creature comforts,
like pillows, blankets and even roofs.
So David designed an experiment to test these simian sleep specialists
under controlled conditions.
What we did was we manipulated the sleeping environments
that the orangutans were in
and we introduced really high-quality sleeping materials,
like memory foam mattresses
and pillows and sheets and comforters.
And when we gave them this high-quality material,
we recorded their sleep physiology.
We recorded the REM and non-REM and total sleep,
and we found that their sleep was really high quality
when they used these materials.
But we wanted to take it one more step,
so we gave them touch-screen cognitive tasks the very next day
and we discovered that, in fact, the nights where they had the best
access to the highest-quality materials,
they scored the most accurate on these tests.
David had confirmed that the sleeping platforms built
by orangutans were boosting their brain power
and this raised an interesting possibility.
Could the act of building itself be the key to our success as a species,
starting us on a path to become
the best builders on the planet?
For David, there's only one answer.
And I think what we have here with early human evolution
is where early proto-apes were building these sleeping platforms
and, when they did that, they unleashed a watershed event
where they were getting high-quality sleep,
they were getting deeper sleep, they were getting more REM,
and this enhanced their cognitive abilities for their very next day.
They had basically primed their brains
to be successful that following day
and so that could have been a really critical moment
in early human evolution.
Evolution is littered with tipping points
and, where discovering fire
will always play an important role in ours,
it's fascinating to consider that the act of building itself
could be just as significant, setting us on a course
from constructing rudimentary sleeping platforms
to the International Space Station, all within a few million years.
It's amazing to think, isn't it, that the simple nests built
by our evolutionary ancestors may have allowed us to develop
the intelligence to build?
Although, when it comes to the hammock,
I wish someone had put a bit more effort
into a method of dismounting it elegantly.
It's a problem great apes probably solved long ago,
but, hey, nobody's perfect.
Luckily, nature is packed full of inspiration
for us to build better
and, as we've seen, there's a lot we can learn from species
as diverse as beavers, termites,
bees and even prairie dogs.
I wonder which animal will be next on that list.
Maybe the snail.
The snail builds its own home,
doesn't need to pack it up to move.
It avoids all of that stress.
The snail, my money's on that.
But they've got to fix the hammock first.
In the next episode, I'll be exploring the ways that animals
cleverly work together
and how we can learn a thing or two
from their intelligent social networks.