Mr. Tangled Man: What Humans Can Learn from a Gulmohar Tree's Three-Floor Community to Build Self-Sustaining Apartment Towers

This study looks at a single large gulmohar tree (Delonix regia) in a residential community park in Kondapur, Hyderabad, and asks which part of the tree is the busiest. An eight-year-old child researcher named the tree "Mr. Tangled Man" because of its tall, tangled branches, and treated it like a building with three floors: the ground and roots, the trunk, and the branches. For fourteen days between 23 August and 5 September 2026 he watched the tree for ten minutes a day, counting the visitors on each floor, noting the busiest floor and the size of the biggest visitor, and recording the weather, a sketch and his own questions. More than 800 visitors of thirteen kinds were counted. About two-thirds were on the ground, mostly ants, millipedes and earthworms, about a quarter were on the trunk, where ants and millipedes moved up and down, and fewer than one in ten were in the branches, which were used by butterflies, wasps, whiteflies, birds and a squirrel. Each kind of visitor kept mostly to its own floor, and mornings were about three times busier than afternoons. The idea that the sunny branches would be the busiest floor was not supported. The paper relates these patterns to published work on how animals divide up the different layers of a tree and on how ants follow chemical trails. The way the tree's visitors share its floors inspired a design for a three-floor apartment tower: a roof garden with solar panels and nesting places for birds, a central "trunk" for lifts and stairs with bark-like shading on the walls, and a ground floor with rainwater harvesting and a composting unit that turns food scraps into garden soil and cooking gas. A shoe-box model of the tower was planned. The paper also notes the limits of the study, including the short daily watch, the change between morning and afternoon visits and the difficulty of counting small animals high in the branches.