The homes that animals build are just as much a product of evolution as the creatures themselves
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I have long been fascinated by the homes that animals construct. Over the years I have contemplated the nests of hundreds of different species—including ants, termites, wasps, birds, fish and mice—by poking and prodding nests in the wild, manipulating them in the laboratory and reviewing the work of other scientists. I have dug holes meters deep, trying to find the bottoms of ant nests. I have snorkeled over bluegill fish, watching them excavate and tend to their dish-shaped nests. As a boy, I even tried to swim up into a beaver lodge.
In studying these homes, I have encountered an astonishing diversity of forms. Some nests are long, straight tunnels. Some are branching labyrinths. Others spin in wild helices or take on elaborate fractal forms. But what I find most remarkable about each construction is that it evolved. Each type of nest is just as integral a part of the species and individuals that made it as the animals' limbs, eye color, skin covering and genes. Indeed, the instructions to build nests must be, at least in part, inscribed in the genes of the animal kingdom's architects.
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