Nominally, Underbug is a book about termites. But the work is actually a profile of the obsessive scientists who study them. These people are willing to drag themselves to isolated African savannahs and to live in primitive conditions in order to watch termites pile up balls of dirt.
Termites may hold the key to designing robots that operate en masse and without outside direction. The emergent order of termite behavior may provide clues into stock market values, voting patterns and other human activity.
Underbug also raises the philosophical question of what makes up an individual. Is a termite colony itself a superorganism, or just a loose collection of individual units? Margonelli shows how scientists over the last two centuries have vacillated on this issue.
The many dead ends and failed experiments reveal just how challenging it is to study these seemingly simple creatures.
But for most of us, termites are fearful pests. As one of the few animals capable of eating wood, they do billions of dollars in damage to structures each year. In Underbug, we see how increasing global temperatures could lead to even greater damage, as termites move into zones previously off limits.
While termites might seem an strange topic for a general science book, readers who dip into Underbug will find the researchers oddly charming and the potential benefits from the study of these social insects compelling.

For most people, termites cross out paths as a cue to call the Orkin people and eliminate them as a threat to our property. For the researchers Margonelli follows in this well-written work of popular science, "termite safaris" to Namibia and Arizona hold the key to finding gut bacteria that may aid in processing biofuels, termite behavior may inspire nano-robotic programming, and their social behavior already caused Kipling to engage in a paean to benevolent fascism in Just So Stories.