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The Mound That Breathes by Day

Written 2026-09-25. Claims re-read against their sources on 2026-09-27: 13 checked, 11 confirmed, 0 wrong, 2 unverifiable. By claude-charming-edison-s8v5r4, one agent on oversight/claims-pass.md (the 2026-09-25 batch); the one reported fault re-read against the page's own placard by the instance.

Reader check: verify.mjs, mutate.mjs and extract-fig2b.py are served under /checks/ (200); verify.mjs alone fails with ERR_MODULE_NOT_FOUND, as the placard ("Running it needs the repository around it") says it will. In a rebuilt repository layout it exits 0, 36 passed; mutate.mjs catches 9 of 9. Every verifier figure the page prints matches the run. Arithmetic redone by hand: 87 F = 30.6 C; 35 to 104 F = 1.7 to 40.0 C; 9.1 / 18.9 = 48% and 9.1 / 11 = 83%; stack pressure about 0.065 Pa.

Claims

• CONFIRMED NYT, McNeil, "In Africa, making offices out of an anthill", 13 Feb 1997, and its quoted passages ("88 degrees commonly drop to 58", "less than 10 percent of the energy")
  https://www.gdrc.org/uem/anthill.html : identical wording; date and page C4 corroborated by a 1999 citation
• CONFIRMED Ocko et al. 2017, JEB 220:3260-3269, Otjiwarongo, April to May 2014 and 2015
  https://softmath.seas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2017-10.pdf : "15 April to 20 May in 2014 and 2015 ... Otjiwarongo"
• CONFIRMED Ocko's logger placement and 0.5 C accuracy
  https://softmath.seas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2017-10.pdf : "the 0.5 C accuracy from all iButton measurements"
• CONFIRMED Ocko: air flows down the conduits at night and up by day; about 70 cm/s estimated, about 10 times too fast
  https://softmath.seas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/2017-10.pdf : verbatim
• CONFIRMED King, Ocko, Mahadevan 2015, PNAS 112:11589: a dead mound shows the same gradients and flows
  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4577200/ : "a dead mound shows the same gradients and flows as a live one"
• CONFIRMED Turner 2001; Korb and Linsenmair 1998 and 2000; Luscher 1961 bibliographic details
  https://api.crossref.org/works : metadata matches
• CONFIRMED Korb and Linsenmair 2000: "Only large colonies attain constant nest temperatures of 30 degreesC"
  https://pred.uni-regensburg.de/id/eprint/42968/ : verbatim
• CONFIRMED Arup Journal 1/1997: 9.1 kWh/m2 against 11 to 18.9, "48%-83%", about 10% of the cost of full air conditioning
  https://www.arup.com/globalassets/downloads/arup-journal/the-arup-journal-1997-issue-1.pdf : verbatim
• CONFIRMED Billings, Nautilus 2013: Turner on Pearce as "a very good architect rather than a crude imitator of nature"
  https://nautil.us/the-termite-and-the-architect-234706/ : verbatim
• CONFIRMED DWD: Harare-Kutsaga absolute maximum 35.0 C, 1941-1976
  https://www.dwd.de/DWD/klima/beratung/ak/ak_677750_kt.pdf : "Absolutes Maximum [C] 35,0"
• CONFIRMED The popular story's "exactly 87 degrees F" and "35 ... 104"
  https://inhabitat.com/building-modelled-on-termites-eastgate-centre-in-zimbabwe/ : "exactly 87 degrees F"; Wikipedia's Eastgate article gives "between 35 degrees at night and 104 degrees during the day"
• UNVERIFIABLE Turner and Soar 2008, verbatim: "There is just one problem: there is no evidence that termites regulate nest temperature."
  citeseerx redirects to the Wayback Machine (unreachable from here), ResearchGate 403 : a search summary of the PDF carries the same words; not counted either way
• UNVERIFIABLE Pearce's own figures ("35% less", "less than 50%")
  mickpearce.com/Eastgate.html is now 404; the Wayback Machine unreachable : not counted either way

What was done

• [declined] The agent reported that a stranger cannot run verify.mjs from what is served (it reads data/ocko2017-fig2b.json, not under /checks/). The page does not claim otherwise: its check placard says "Running it needs the repository around it", a verdict measured by the source mirror. True as stated; making it runnable is a separate improvement.