How Ant Laboratory works

A guide to the current development build for iPhone and iPad. Public release is still to come.

Ant Laboratory is a slow, living simulation of an ant colony. You choose one of six real species and release one newly mated queen into a glass ant farm. Everything after that happens by itself: digging, raising brood, foraging, burying the dead and the game’s queen succession system. In time the colony breaks out of the farm and spreads across an island of its own.

• Getting started
• Controls
• Species
• Life of a colony
• The land outside
• The island
• Neighbours and nature
• Weather and disasters
• Choices and genes
• The Lab
• Saving and time away
• Real ants

Getting started

• Pick a species and release the queen. Choose a species, then tap anywhere inside the ant farm, or use Release at a random spot. She digs in, seals herself away and raises the first workers alone. You can type an island seed and pick a size first, or leave it empty for a new island.
• Observer or Colony Keeper. Observer is relaxed watching: the feeder keeps the colony fed and big decisions happen by themselves. As Colony Keeper you feed the colony, scout its neighbours and make its choices, with optional goals. Switch any time in Settings; nothing is reset.
• Keep several colonies. My colonies (under More on iPhone) lists every colony you have started. Each one saves itself, so you can switch between them and pick up where you left off. You can rename, copy, export or delete them there.
• Tips as you go. The first time something happens (the first workers, the first outdoor nest, a new queen) a short tip explains it. Tips introduce new milestones as the colony grows. You can turn them off in Settings.

Controls

• Look around. Pinch to zoom and drag to move. Double tap to zoom in; in the ant farm, a double tap when you are already close zooms back out.
• Pick an ant. Tap an ant to see who she is, what she is doing and what she carries. Touch and hold to follow her through the nest.
• The bar along the bottom (down the side when you hold an iPhone sideways): pause, speed, the island or the ant farm, feed, plant (on the map), the Lab, the colony panel and More, which holds Disasters, My colonies, Settings, and About and privacy. On iPad these have buttons of their own.
• Speed. At 1× a colony day lasts 12 seconds. Tap the speed button to step through 2×, 5×, 10× and 25×.
• The colony panel holds the colony's numbers, its needs, the queen and the colony log. The line at the top of the screen shows the day, the workers and the most pressing need; tap it to open the panel.
• Zoom out past the ant farm to see the research shelter it stands in and the land around it. The scale button on the map (Island, Region, Habitat, Nest, Chamber, Ant) jumps to any level, and the row at the top takes you home to the founding nest or from nest to nest.
• Dive into a nest. On the map, double tap a nest or pinch open on it, and the view dives underground into a cut through its tunnels and chambers. Pinch back out to rise to the map again.
• Feed. An automatic feeder drops food on the surface. You can also drop seeds, sugar, a fly or a cricket by hand with Feed, then tap the food to follow its journey: found, trail, carried, delivered.
• With a keyboard on iPad: Space pauses, 1–5 set the speed, M the map, F feed, L the Lab, H the colony panel, C the next ant.

Six species

Each species looks, eats and behaves differently, and each lives in its own climate and landscape.

• Black garden ant (Lasius niger). Farms aphids for honeydew and piles up a small soil mound. Colonies of 4,000–7,000 workers, at a garden's edge.
• Wood ant (Formica rufa). Builds a dome of pine needles that keeps the nest warm, keeps many queens and sprays formic acid. Colonies of 100,000–400,000 workers, in pine forest.
• Leafcutter ant (Atta sexdens). Cuts leaves to grow a fungus garden that feeds the colony, with workers from tiny gardeners to big-headed soldiers. Tropical, with colonies of millions.
• Carpenter ant (Camponotus pennsylvanicus). Big ants that carve their nest in a rotting log, with small minors and large majors. Slow to grow, in oak woodland.
• Harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex barbatus). Gathers seeds, keeps a bare gravel disc around the nest, and has a painful sting. On dry grassland.
• Fire ant (Solenopsis invicta). Small, fierce and fast-growing. In a flood the workers link into rafts instead of drowning. In sunny pasture.

The life of a colony

Founding

In the simulation, the founding queen seals herself into a small chamber and raises her first brood without leaving it, feeding them from her own body reserves. The first workers to emerge are small. Once they open the nest, the colony starts to forage.

Brood

Eggs hatch into larvae, which nurses feed until they spin cocoons and emerge as adult workers. How fast that happens depends on temperature: brood barely grows below 10°C and grows fastest near 28°C. Nurses carry larvae and cocoons to the warmest chamber of the right kind, near the surface in summer and deeper down in winter.

Work

Workers split into nurses, diggers, foragers and undertakers. Each ant has her own willingness to do each job. It shifts with age, so young workers stay with the brood and older ones go outside, and it grows with practice, so ants tend to stick with the job they know. The colony's needs set how many ants each job takes, and the most willing ants fill it.

Diggers carry soil up and out, building a mound around the entrance. Foragers lay scent trails to food and carry it back to the stores. Undertakers carry the dead to a refuse pile away from the entrance.

Food

The stores hold two kinds of food. Sugar, from seeds and sweet drops, fuels the adults. Protein, from insects, goes to the larvae and the queen, who need it to grow and lay eggs. When the sugar runs out, adults have to eat protein, and a diet heavy in protein shortens their lives. The colony panel names what is short, where, and whether food is already on its way.

Seasons and temperature

The surface warms and cools through the year, with spells of warmer and cooler weather. Deep soil stays close to 15°C all year, so the nest is warmer than the surface in winter and cooler in summer. In winter the colony rests deep in the nest and the queen stops laying, then everyone wakes up in spring. In summer a large colony raises winged princesses and males and sends them out on a mating flight.

Succession

In this simplified game model, when the old queen nears the end of her life, one princess stays behind as heir and takes the throne when she dies. If the royal line dies out completely, a new queen arrives some days later and founds a new dynasty in the old nest.

From the ant farm to the land outside

The ant farm stands in a small research shelter, with windows onto the species' own landscape. It is the colony's founding nest, where the queen lives, and it stays that way. When a few hundred workers fill it, the chambers crowd and scouts start testing the edges of the case. Then you choose: open the access port, a clear tube to the ground outside, or keep the colony contained as a challenge, sealing the seams its scouts find. In Observer mode the port opens by itself after a while.

Once the port is open, a scout finds the opening, a scent trail forms through the tube, foragers bring food in from outside, workers start digging nearby and the first outdoor nest is founded. From then on the colony grows out on the land, towards the size wild colonies of its species reach.

• One colony, counted once. Workers are in the ant farm, out on a trip through the port, or in an outdoor nest. The whole colony changes only by births and deaths; moving between nests changes nothing.
• Nests with lives of their own. Tap an outdoor nest to see its numbers, its trails and its history, then look inside. Each nest is named after the place it was dug (a stone, an old tree, a stream, a hill) and has a role: a queen nest, a nursery, a hub, a supplier, a frontier outpost. Nests with food to spare send it along the trails to ones that are short, and as Colony Keeper you can send food or workers yourself.
• Land is food. The colony holds the ground its foragers cover, and trees add more: aphids to farm, leaves for fungus gardens, seeds and insects. The colony grows until it has as many workers as its land can feed.
• Help the colony. On the map, Feed scatters food for about two months, and Plant plants a young tree that feeds the colony for good once it grows on the colony's land.

An island of its own

Every colony grows on its own island, shaped by a seed: hills and hollows, streams running down to the sea, ponds, coves and headlands, woods that follow the wet ground, and open country between. The island is named, and so are its regions and landmarks. The same seed and size always grow the same island; what the colony does on it is its own story.

Beyond the home range lie the island's other regions: woods, wetland, dunes, heath, meadow and more, each with its own ground, food, wild colonies and dangers. Spreading into them is meant to take seasons, not days.

• Scouting. Scouts from nests near an edge probe across it and survey what lies beyond. As Colony Keeper you see nothing of a region until they do.
• Expeditions. Once the far side is mapped, a big outdoor nest near the edge can send an expedition to found an outpost. Tap a region to see its outlook: its food, how well the colony would cope, the rivals there and how long the supply line would be.
• Adapting and settling. An outpost struggles while the colony is not suited to the new ground: heat, cold, wet or drought cost it workers and slow its brood. Over months it adapts, and its genes shift towards workers who cope. Once adapted and well grown, the colony has settled the region and can spread on.

Neighbours and nature

• Aphids in the farm. Bean plants sprout on the surface and aphids settle on them in spring. Once a scout finds them, tenders keep going back to stroke the aphids for honeydew, a sugary food. Ladybirds take aphids nobody guards.
• A sealed enclosure. The ant farm is a clean, closed case. Rival ants may settle just outside the shelter, but no spider, raider or spore gets in.
• Rival colonies outdoors. Other colonies hold land around yours. Where two colonies meet, workers fight along the border, most of all in spring, and now and then a big rival sends a raid against one of your outdoor nests.
• Wolf spiders. A spider takes up a hunting spot by a nest's entrances and picks off foragers. A big nest can mob it and kill it; a small one hopes it moves on.
• Fungal disease. Spores spread on damp ground between outdoor nests. Nestmates groom each other clean, and sick workers leave the nest to die away from their sisters.

Weather and disasters

Weather happens out on the land, where the outdoor nests and the wild colonies live. The ant farm is safe in its shelter; only workers out on trips through the tube are at risk.

• Thunderstorms and floods. Heavy rain floods the low ground, along streams and in wetland most of all. A nest caught in the water floods from the bottom up: dive inside to watch it fill. Fire ants link into rafts. When the water drains, the land teems with drowned insects for a few days.
• Wildfire. Lightning sets dry ground alight and the wind drives the fire on until it runs out of fuel or meets a stream, a track or rain. Foragers caught outside burn, mounds of needles and logs go up in flames, smoke pours down the entrances, and trees die. The ground turns black, then comes back greener than before.
• Drought. A month or more without rain over one region: plants wilt, food there halves, fires start easily, and workers that can't take the heat die.
• Disasters on demand. Disasters lets you aim a storm, strike with lightning or choose where a drought falls, and send a wolf spider, a raid or fungal spores against a colony on the map. Natural disasters happen by themselves a few times a year; you can turn them off or make them frequent.

Choices and genes

Every few weeks something turns up that calls for a choice: a fallen fruit with an oily sheen, a wandering queen, orphaned brood, rival scouts, slave-makers on the march, a heat wave, a zombie fungus, a dead mouse, a fire bearing down on a nest. As Colony Keeper the game waits for you, or you can let the colony decide. As Observer the colony weighs it up and decides by itself, unless you step in. Results often show only days later. Settings can make these more frequent, or turn them off.

Each colony carries nine heritable traits in its queens: aggression, heat tolerance, cold hardiness, flood survival, fertility, longevity, disease resistance, body size and speed. Mutagens, new blood from other colonies and hard times change them: a heat wave leaves the survivors hardier, birds pick off the slow. None of them comes free: heat tolerance costs cold hardiness, bigger or faster colonies need more food, long-lived workers are slower. Changes from mutagens and meteorites go beyond real biology and are marked Experimental wherever they appear.

The Lab

The Lab measures the colony once per simulated day and shows it in nine sections:

• Population: workers, brood by stage, winged ants, eggs laid and workers emerging.
• Life and death: deaths by cause, a survival curve with the median lifespan, the ages of living workers and the average age at death for each cause.
• Work and food: who does which job, jobs by age, sugar and protein in the stores, food collected and eaten, and foraging success.
• Nest: the area dug, the deepest tunnel, and a map of where ants walk most.
• Climate: soil temperature at the surface, around the brood and deep down, brood growth speed, and temperature by depth.
• Ecology: aphids and honeydew in the farm, and out on the land: raids, predators and disease, and what each costs.
• Territory: the whole colony against what its land can feed, the land it holds, its rivals, and losses to fights, floods, fire and drought.
• Genome: the nine traits, the colony's DNA, the traits over time, every mutation with its cause, and every choice the colony faced.
• Data: the island seed and the simulation seed, and spreadsheet (CSV) files of the daily measurements, every recorded death, the worker life table and the colony log, which you can save or send from the share sheet.

Every chart has a table view. The island and simulation seeds are shown separately so you can keep track of a run. The game provides a model to explore, rather than a validated biological experiment.

Saving and time away

• It saves itself. The game periodically saves colonies on your device and keeps native file copies. Save and recovery behavior is still being tested; use Export to keep separate copies of important colonies.
• While you're away. By default the colony waits, paused, exactly where you left it, and a welcome card offers to carry on. If you would rather it kept living, Settings → While you're away lets it catch up when you return (a day for every half hour away, up to a month, or a day for every ten minutes, up to three months), with a summary of what happened.
• Export and import. Settings → Export save sends a colony as a file through the share sheet: to Files, AirDrop, Mail. Import save brings one back as a new colony.

Real ants and the simulation

The simulation is built to be watched, so it bends a few facts:

• Queens live far longer in reality. A black garden ant queen kept in a laboratory lived for almost 29 years. The default here is about three years, so you get to see successions. You can choose up to about 20 years in Settings.
• Real colonies usually end with their queen. Single-queen species such as the black garden ant don't replace their queen; the heir system keeps a colony going. Wood ants really do keep many queens.
• The farm is only part of the nest. The ant farm holds a couple of thousand ants at most, each one simulated. The rest of a big colony is counted nest by nest out on the island, with a sample of its workers shown inside each nest.
• Lives are sped up. Workers' lives are shortened so that generations turn over at a watchable pace, and islands are about a kilometre across so a colony can reach the far side in a few years of play.
• Genes are simplified. Real ant traits come from many genes and change over many generations. Here a handful of traits can shift in weeks. Selection by hard times follows real ideas; a strange fruit changing a colony does not, and is marked Experimental.
• The numbers are stylised. Temperatures, growth rates and diet effects follow the right shapes, but they are simplified rather than measured from real colonies. Treat the Lab as a way to explore ideas, not as field data.