How Ant Laboratory works

Ant Laboratory is a slow, living simulation of an ant colony. You choose from seven species, pick a soil and release one newly mated queen into a glass ant farm. The colony handles its own digging, brood care, foraging, hunting and succession. Keep it in its farm, where it grows on to fill it, or open its access port and let its workers spread across an island of their own while the founding queen stays in the farm.

Getting started

Pick a species, a soil and release the queen. Choose a species, then the soil for its farm (see Species and soils). Tap the soil in the ant farm, or tap Random spot, to release the queen, and watch the first workers emerge. Founding is simplified, and the wood-ant solo start is labelled Experimental. Under the species you can also type an island seed and pick the island's size, or leave the seed empty for a brand-new island (see An island of its own).
Made for watching. The feeder supports the colony, the whole island is visible and the ants share out the work and spread by themselves. You can inspect, feed, set the habitat, call the weather on the island, change the speed and investigate the records.
Keep several colonies. My colonies (under More on iPhone, a button of its own on iPad) 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. A deleted colony leaves a recovery copy, under Other recovery copies, so you can bring it back.
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 wait their turn and never pop up under your finger. 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.
Knock on the glass. In the ant farm, a double tap knocks on the glass and startles the ants nearby. A single tap never does.
Hide interface. Under More, Hide interface clears every button and label away for a clean view of the colony. One button brings them back.
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. Tap the round lens on her card to examine her (see The Ant cam).
The bar along the bottom (down the side when you hold an iPhone sideways) reads Play (or Pause), the speed, Island, Feed, Habitat, Data, Colony and More. Island takes you out to the map, where the same button reads Formicarium and brings you back. On the map, Weather takes the place of Habitat. An older colony without an island has Forest there instead.
More holds Home, Cinematic mode, My colonies, Settings, About and privacy, and a sound switch. On the smallest phones, Data and then Habitat move into More too (on the map, Data and then Weather).
Settings, under Display. Interface is Glass, clear glass over the colony, or Classic, the solid panels and bars of earlier versions. Room names shows the names of the rooms By zoom (when you are near enough to see the rooms), Always, When I tap or Off. In the iPhone and iPad app, the screen stays on while the colony runs, unless you turn off Keep the screen on while the colony runs; paused for two minutes, it sleeps as usual.
On iPad, the speeds sit in a row. Home (the house), My colonies (the stacked boxes), Cinematic mode (the film camera), the colony panel and Settings (the gear) have buttons of their own. About and privacy is at the bottom of Settings.
Habitat. While you look at the ant farm, tap Habitat to open its light, water and warmth. Tap it again to close them. It is hidden on the island and inside outdoor nests, because it sets only the ant farm. See The habitat.
Weather. On the map, tap Weather to strike lightning or call a downpour where you tap. See Weather.
Speed. At 1× a colony day lasts 12 seconds. On iPhone, tap the speed button to step through 2×, 5×, 10× and 25×; on iPad, tap a speed in the row.
Ant cam. The colony panel has a small camera that follows one ant; tap it to watch her full screen. See The Ant cam.
The colony panel holds the colony's numbers, its needs, the queen, the family tree 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 from the ant farm to see the whole lodge it stands in, then further out to the map of the land around it. The scale button on the map (Island, Region, Microhabitat, 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. Drag to look around it, and 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. Tap Feed again when you are done. On the map, Feed scatters food for the outdoor nests (see In or out).
With a keyboard on iPad or Mac: Space pauses, 1–5 set the speed, M the map, F feed, W the weather on the map, D Data, H hides the interface (and brings it back), K knocks on the glass, C the next ant, 0 resets the zoom and Esc closes what is open.

The Ant cam

The Ant cam is a close-up camera on one ant in the ant farm. It sits in the colony panel, under the queen. Beneath the picture it says who she is and what she is doing, where she is going, what she carries and why she does her job.

Who it follows. It takes turns between the queen and busy workers: foragers, diggers, and nurses feeding the larvae. Tap an ant in the farm, or touch and hold her, and the camera stays with her.
Full screen. Tap the camera to watch her full screen, closer in. The colony carries on at your speed, and tips wait until you close it. The × or a swipe down brings you back. With a keyboard, Esc closes it and C moves on to another ant.
Find her. Find in view shows her in the ant farm, and Follow in view keeps the view on her as she goes. If she is out on a trip through the port, Show on the map finds her outside.

Examine her. Tap the round lens on an ant’s card. Her card tells her age, the day she was born, her nature, what she has practised and her length, and time stops while it is open.
Under the lens. From her card, or with the magnifying lamp in the lodge, a soft brush lifts her into a small dish. She walks its rim beside a scale bar of her true length; tap a part of her body to learn its name. Put her back and she is set down exactly where she was. The queen is examined where she is, never lifted out.
A goodbye. Follow a worker in the ant farm to the end of her life, and the game tells her story, stays with her as a sister carries her out, then follows that sister.

You can turn the Ant cam off in Settings.

Seven species, six soils

Each species looks, eats and behaves differently, and each lives in its own climate and landscape. Fire ants can start as one queen or many queens (the many-queen start is Experimental). Fire ants, leafcutters and carpenter ants raise their big majors once the colony is big enough to afford them.

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, may have one queen or several 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.
Turtle ant (Cephalotes varians). Flat, armoured, rusty-brown ants that never dig. Their tank is a network of sticks, forks, branches and bamboo, and they move into the old beetle holes in the wood through small round doors. A soldier plugs each door with her flat, round head. They eat pollen, nectar and honeydew and never hunt. Colonies of a few hundred to about 1,000, in the dead twigs of coastal trees.

After the species, you choose the soil for the ant farm, as you would for a real tank: garden loam, sand, clay, woodland humus, stony soil or wetland soil. Your species’ own soil is picked first, with a short line on what suits it. The soil changes only the look, its colours and texture; the ants live and dig the same in every soil. You choose it once, when you set the colony up. Turtle ants live in wood and dig nothing, so for them you choose the floor under the wood instead.

The life of a colony

Founding

The game starts with a queen in a small chamber raising her first brood. This is simplified across species: the wood-ant solo start is Experimental, because wild wood ants found colonies with help from other ants. The first workers to emerge are small. Once they open the nest, the colony starts to forage. When the colony has dug rooms well below her founding chamber, the queen walks down to one in the middle of the nest, as real queens do, and her attendants carry the eggs after her; her founding chamber becomes a nursery. In a grown outdoor nest the queen lives in the middle too.

Brood

Eggs hatch into larvae, which nurses feed until they pupate and later emerge as adult workers. Black garden, wood and carpenter ant larvae spin a cocoon to pupate in; harvester, leafcutter and fire ant pupae are bare, as in the wild. How fast that happens depends on temperature: brood barely grows below 10°C and grows fastest near 28°C. Nurses carry larvae and pupae 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. When a kind of room gets crowded, they widen the most crowded one before they dig another, and big ants need more room than small ones. Foragers lay scent trails to food and carry it back to the stores. Undertakers lay the dead on a small refuse heap a short walk from the entrance, usually where the soil the ants dug out meets the ground. As that soil spreads, they start a new heap at its edge, and the old one rots down into dark earth.

In the farm the ants keep to the floors, walls and roofs of their tunnels and rooms, and some walk the back wall or the glass in front: those at the back look smaller and in shade, those on the glass crisp and in full light. In an outdoor nest's cut-away, some cross a room over its back wall, and they pause now and then on their way.

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.

Hunting and live food

Drop live crickets or fruit flies with Feed, and meat-eating ants hunt them. One ant bites and calls her nestmates, and together they drag the prey home. A cricket too big for the door is cut up outside and carried in piece by piece. Vegetarian ants, the leafcutters and turtle ants, leave live prey alone; turtle ants lick a dead insect where it lies. Feed also has strawberries and blueberries, and leaves for the leafcutters to cut up.

Life together

Ants groom themselves and each other, share food mouth to mouth, feed the larvae and the queen, and help new workers out of their cocoons. When their path is blocked, they find another way.

Seasons and temperature

The surface warms and cools through the year, with spells of warmer and cooler weather. Deep soil stays close to the year's average all year (about 15°C where black garden ants live), so the nest is warmer than the surface in winter and cooler in summer. In winter most species rest 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. How the island looks and sounds through the year is under The seasons.

Succession

When the queen dies, another of the nest's laying queens takes over if there is one. If not, a princess who stayed behind as heir when the old queen neared the end of her life takes the throne (Experimental). While at least 20 workers are left to tend her, a winged daughter can take over too, or the workers can raise a new queen from an egg or a young larva (Experimental).

The end of a colony

If no queen is left and none can follow, the game tells you. The workers live out their lives, and you can watch to the end or start a new colony. A colony dies out only when every ant is gone: in the farm, on trips and in the outdoor nests. Then the game says so and offers Start a new colony, My colonies or Stay and look. The old colony stays in My colonies, marked with the day it died out.

The habitat

The ant farm is a small, living world. While you look at it, tap Habitat to set its light, water and warmth. Each change you make is noted in Field notes and flagged on the charts, so you can see what followed.

Light. Choose Bright, Soft or Off, or any brightness with the slider, up to 200%: twice as bright as Bright. Above 100%, a pool of light falls under the lamp. With the lamp off, a little room light remains. Plants follow the brightness over a couple of weeks: lush in bright light, few and leggy in dim light. They grow a little lusher up to about 150%; past that, the extra light only dries the soil faster. The lamp's colour is mostly for looks.
Water. With Water automatically on, the mister keeps the soil right for your species, even under a bright lamp. Turn it off, and the Mister slider sets how much it sprays. It sprays up to three times a day, and you can watch the mist drift down. The panel shows how damp the soil is and how humid the air is. The humidity comes from the water and the warmth together.
Warmth. With Follow the lodge's temperature on, the tank warms and cools with the seasons. Turn it off, and the Heat mat slider holds the tank at the warmth you pick, from 5°C to 36°C. Warm brood grows faster, up to a point. Below 10°C (18°C for harvester ants), the species that rest in winter go to rest.
A warm end and a damp end. The heat mat can lie under the Whole floor, the Left end or the Right end, and the watering can be Even, Wetter left or Wetter right. A warm end is about 4°C warmer than the far end. Strips along the base of the glass show where it is warm and where it is damp. Nurses carry pupae to the warmer, drier rooms and eggs and young larvae to the damper ones, a simplification of what real nurses weigh up.
Mist by hand. Under Water, tap Mist by hand and then a spot, or Whole farm to mist all along the lid. The spray bottle in the lodge does the same. It stops before the soil gets wet enough to drown eggs, and on automatic the mister gives that much less next time.
A winter rest. For black garden, wood, carpenter and harvester ants, with the heat mat on, Rest the colony cools the mat over about two weeks, holds it for about two months and warms it again over ten days. Workers age more slowly while they rest. Wake them now ends it early. Kept warm all year, these colonies still go quiet for a few weeks in late autumn, when the queen lays few eggs (with seasons on).
Mould. Food left lying in damp, warm air goes mouldy. Once mouldy, food stays spoilt: the ants will not eat it, undertakers carry it to the refuse heap when the dead are cleared, and you can lift it out with tweezers from its card. Mould grows on the heap too, out of what it feeds on, with a mat of fine threads under it. Now and then, small yellow mushrooms come up by the heap and are gone in days. Mould never harms an ant.
Clean the farm. Tap Clean the farm, then drag a finger (or the mouse) over the glass. A small nozzle lifts out the dead ants and spoilt food near its tip, through open tunnels, rooms and air, never through soil, with a soft whirr. It never takes a living ant, brood, fresh food, the queen or anything an ant is carrying, and a body that has lain long on an old refuse heap has become soil and stays. Each clean is flagged on the charts.
Springtails. These tiny soil animals multiply in damp soil and graze the mould. Foragers catch a few as a snack of protein. How much food one gives is Experimental.
A greening surface. Over weeks, bare soil turns green: first a crust of algae, then moss, then grass and seedlings, as light and damp allow. Moss copes with dim light; grass needs bright light. Soil the ants dig out is bare again, so busy entrances stay bare. After long bright, humid spells, a green film of algae grows on the inside of the glass. The stages are real; how fast they come here is Experimental.
Rich soil. An old refuse heap that held many dead turns, once it is left, into dark rich soil where the surface greens twice as fast, and pot mushrooms come up near it (how fast is Experimental).
Careful keeping. Larvae die after days in soil that is too dry, eggs go mouldy in soil that is too wet (Experimental), and with the heat mat on, brood dies if the tank stays too hot, or too cold for warm-country ants such as fire ants and leafcutters. The colony panel warns you first, with a button to the habitat. Adult ants are never harmed by the habitat.

Data shows it all, with Formicarium chosen at the top: the brightness you set, soil water and humidity and brood lost to the habitat under Climate, and aphids, mould, springtails and the greening of the surface under Ecology.

The lodge

The ant farm stands on a bench in a small research lodge, drawn at its real size: a room about 3.8 metres across, with the farm 58 cm long. Its windows, in slim grey-green frames over an oak window board, look out on the land around the lodge: the island's own hills, trees, ponds and sea, your nests' mounds and the wild colonies'. They follow the season week by week: the nearest trees sway and the clouds drift in one wind, rain beads on the glass, and frost and snow come in winter. Pinch out from the glass to see the whole room. Pinch out further and the map of the land opens.

The computer. Its screen takes turns through the colony's readings: workers, soil water, humidity and springtails. Tap it to open ANT OS, with Data (see ANT OS).
Light and door. The tank has a glowing lamp, the room has a light switch, and the lodge has a proper door.
Things to tap. The census chart opens Data, the thermometer the climate chart, the watering can Habitat, each food jar Feed with that food, the books the field guide, the magnifying lamp the dish under the lens, and the spray bottle mists the farm. Rest the pointer on one, or press and hold on a phone, to see its name.
The radio. It plays the developer's own soundtrack, eight tracks played in turn. It is off until you tap it. A tap turns it on and opens its card: On, Off, the volume, Next track and Play outside too. You hear it in the lodge, softer as you look into the glass. The music is part of the app, so it needs no internet. Settings has Radio in the lodge and Radio volume too.
The loudspeaker. A loudspeaker hangs on the outside of the lodge, above the radio, and you can see it on the map when you are close. It is off until you turn it on: tap it on the map, tick Play outside too on the radio's card, or turn on Radio outside too in Settings. Then the radio plays out on the map too: loudest beside the lodge, softer as you move away or pull back, and silent over the whole island. Inside a nest you don't hear it. It plays only what the radio plays, so turn the radio on as well.
The field station. Seen from the map, the lodge is a well-kept, working field station: a standing-seam metal roof, a weather mast beside its weather screen, its cups and vane turning in the wind, three solar panels and a small satellite dish. At night, lamplight falls from its windows and door.

ANT OS and its games

The lodge's computer runs ANT OS. Tap the computer, or Data in the bar, to open it. As well as Data, it has:

Games. Ant Arcade (Scent Trail, Seed Run and Ant Trails), Aphid Ranch and Leaf Cutter, and The Long Way Home, a platformer: guide a lost scout ant through a 1990s kitchen, pantry and sink to get home.
Ant Facts. Short facts about ants, each with the source it comes from.
Credits. Who made the game, and with what.

In or out: the farm and the land outside

The ant farm 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: keep the colony contained, or open the access port, a clear tube to the ground outside. The port stays closed until you explicitly open it, even if you dismiss the invitation.

Kept contained

A colony you keep in grows on, slowly, for years. Each year it is kept in, the queen lays more eggs, so it grows a little bigger every summer, but only while it has food to spare. The automatic feeder keeps more food in store for it, enough for the winter. As it needs room, the workers dig new tunnels towards the emptiest part of the farm and new rooms along them, always with solid soil between rooms, and more entrances open.

Where it stops. It levels off when its rooms fill the soil, when its food will not stretch to more, or at about 4,500 ants and brood, the most a phone can keep moving smoothly, one by one. With the feeder on Normal, wood ants get there in about five years; black garden ants reach about 3,400 workers after eight.
How much food. Feeding amount in Settings also sets how much food the feeder keeps in store for a contained colony. Light: slower growth and leaner winters. Generous: faster growth, with more food left lying to go mouldy.
Opening the port later. Choose Open access port in Colony, or in More on a phone. The farm stays as full as it has grown, and the colony's new workers move outside.
Winged ants. In flight season, the winged ants of a closed ant farm climb under the lid, and a card asks: Release them, or Keep them in. Released queens may found daughter colonies on the island.
Your device. A big colony takes more work. At the fastest speeds it may run slower than asked, on older iPhone and iPad models most of all; it never stops.

Let out

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. The founding queen stays indoors, a small group of workers keeps the farm, and the tube stays connected until you close it again. From then on the colony grows out on the land, towards the size wild colonies of its species reach.

Closing the port again. On the map, the colony's card has Close it (on a phone, More has Close access port too). A stopper goes into the tube, and the ant farm is a closed colony again. The cost: outdoor nests cut off from the queen raise no more young, and over the months their workers grow old and their land goes back to the wild. Nests with a queen of their own, or joined to one by trails, carry on. You can open it again at any time.
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.
Every egg is a queen's. A nest with no queen of its own is sent its brood: nurses carry larvae and pupae along the trails from the queen's nest, and you can see them on the map. Workers can lay eggs too, but theirs hatch only into males, so a colony with no queen anywhere raises no new workers.
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. A new nest is founded when a nest has filled the land it can reach: in spring and early summer, by a party of workers that takes brood and food from its parent.
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.
Feed the land. On the map, Feed scatters seeds, sugar water, fruit flies or crickets. The food helps the nest whose land it falls on, inside your coloured border: while you choose, the map shows whose land it is. Sugar fills a hungry nest's stores and ends the starving within days. Flies and crickets feed the brood, so more workers hatch a few weeks later. Seeds are half and half, and keep for 40 days. Food on a wild colony's land feeds them instead (the game warns you first), and food on open ground goes off. No nest ever needs feeding: their land feeds them.
From above and from the side. Dive from the map into a nest and you see the same mound from the side: the same size, the same entrances, about as many workers on top, and snow, fallen leaves, rain, drought or the ash of a fire on the same days.

An island of its own

Every new colony gets an island of its own, grown from a seed. The seed shapes the whole land: a coast of coves and headlands, hills and hollows, streams running down to the sea, ponds, woods that follow the wet ground, and open country between. It divides the island into regions, each its own ecosystem, and names the island, its regions and its landmarks. The species' own home ground always lies around the lodge, and rival colonies already hold ground across the island.

The water looks and moves like water. Waves break into foam along a smooth coast, and the sea runs from its bed of sand or stones in the shallows through turquoise to deep blue. Streams wind down to the sea in pools and riffles, past gravel bars and grassy banks, and their water flows round the stones. Ponds have stones and sunken leaves in their shallows and catch the light. Raindrops ring the water, ice cracks in winter, and inside a flooded nest the water is muddy, with bits of leaf and twig on it.

Size and climate. When you start a colony, pick a small, medium or large island: about 800 m, 1.1 km or 1.4 km across. Its climate follows your species' home: temperate for garden, wood and carpenter ants, warm for fire ants, dry for harvester ants and tropical for leafcutter ants. The climate decides which ecosystems the island holds and what its winter is like.
Seeds. Leave the seed empty for a brand-new island, or type one in. It can be a number or any word.
Share an island. The island's card on the map shows its size and seed, with a Copy button. Start a colony of the same species with that seed and size, and the same island grows again, for you or a friend. 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, further as the colony grows: from 36 metres to about 72 (100 for wood ants and leafcutters). You can see the whole island from the start.
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 gets used to the new ground and loses fewer workers to it. Once adapted and well grown, the colony has settled the region and can spread on.

Life on the island

Daughter colonies. The outdoor nests join the mating flight. About one in a hundred young queens that land on free ground founds a colony of its own: a daughter, and a rival like any neighbour, marked “(daughter)” on the map. For species with one queen to a colony; at most 40 at once.
One supercolony. Wood ants, and fire ants started with many queens, take young queens back into their outdoor nests, many queens to a nest, and wood ants can grow to 150 nests.
Planting. On the map, tap Plant, choose Tree or Shrub and tap the ground. Aphids settle on it and the ants farm them for honeydew; leafcutters cut its leaves and harvester ants take its seeds. A young tree takes about three years to grow, a shrub one summer and gives half as much. Nothing needs watering, but it can burn. Up to 40 in all.
Their own hours. Each species is out at its own time of day, which changes what fire and lightning can catch. Activity by hour in Data shows it.

The seasons

A year on the island lasts 360 days, a little over an hour at 1×. The whole island changes with it: the map, the view from the lodge's windows, the ground over each nest and the sounds.

Spring. Young leaves and fresh grass, blossom on the flowering trees, and a dawn chorus of songbirds, with a cuckoo and a wood pigeon far off. Colonies that rested through the winter wake up, and the queen lays again.
Summer. The deep greens of summer, then dry ground bleaching to straw late in the season, most of all on grassland and heath. Grasshoppers drone in the warm grass. A big colony sends its winged queens and males out on a mating flight.
Autumn. The leaves turn gold, orange and red, then fall and lie on the ground, and the grass turns brown. Dry leaves rustle, crickets sing, the wind comes in gusts, and crows call or geese pass over.
Winter. The broadleaved trees stand bare. On a temperate island snow settles on the land, the trees and the nest mounds, and the ponds and stream edges freeze. It is nearly silent, but for a thin, cold wind and now and then a robin. Warm and dry islands have a wet, grey winter instead, dripping from the trees. Tropical islands have no winter at all, and their forests stay green all year.
The sea and the light. The open sea is a little bluer on summer days and greyer in winter, and turns dark slate under rain, with whitecaps close in. The light on the land is warm in summer, golden as the leaves turn and cool in winter.
Resting through winter. Garden, wood, carpenter and harvester ants rest deep in the nest: the queen stops laying, and the workers stay in, eat less and age more slowly. Leafcutter and fire ants keep going all year. With the heat mat on, the ant farm rests only when the mat is set below 10°C, whatever the season.

To play without seasons, turn off Seasons and winter hibernation in Settings.

Day and night

Night comes slowly: with Sky on Slow (the setting it starts on), a day and night takes about 12 minutes whatever the game's speed, and the light holds while the game is paused. The island grows dim at night, towards a cool blue-grey, never black, and dawn and dusk are golden. With seasons on, days are longer in summer and shorter in winter. Fire and lightning glow at night, the lodge's windows and the sky over a nest turn deep blue-black with stars and the moon, and on the map each species' workers come and go by its own hours. The ant farm keeps its own lamp, and the lodge's room stays lamp-lit. The slow sky only sets the mood: the colony keeps its own faster days. In Settings, under Display, Sky can also be My local time (night when it is night where you are), Time-lapse (the light on the colony's own quick days: deepest at 1× and 2×, very slight at 5× and 10×, a steady day at 25×) or Off, a steady day; it is always day too when your device asks for reduced motion.

Neighbours and nature

Aphids in the farm. Bean plants sprout on the surface and black bean aphids settle on them in spring. How many plants grow, and how lush they are, follows the lamp (see The habitat). Once a scout finds them, tenders keep going back to stroke the aphids for honeydew, a sugary food. Ladybirds take aphids nobody guards.
A safe enclosure, with one door. With the access port closed, the ant farm is a closed case. Rival ants may settle just outside the lodge, but no raider, flood or fire ever gets in. Mould may grow on leftovers in the damp, but it never harms an ant.
Through the open port. With the port open, a wolf spider wanders into the ant farm about once a month, and the ants deal with it. If your colony is carpenter ants, a worker coming home can carry in the zombie-ant fungus, which in the wild makes an infected ant climb a plant and bite down before she dies. Close the port to keep both out.
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. See Battles.
Wolf spiders. A spider takes up a hunting spot by a nest's entrances and picks off foragers, and a busy nest draws more than one. A big nest can mob them and kill them; a small one hopes they move 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 the lodge; 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 kills the ants where it strikes and 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. Food stored near the top of a mound burns, but most of the colony survives deep underground. The ground turns black and gives little food for a while. Some months later it turns green again and, for a season, feeds more than before; new nests and founding queens favour it. A tree a fire killed stands dead, then falls, and a seedling grows up beside it over about three years.
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.
Natural events. Storms, fires and droughts arise by themselves, whether or not you call the weather.

Weather you call

On the island map, tap Weather on the bar (or press W). Pick one of its two tools, then tap the map where you want it.

Strike lightning. A bolt strikes where you tap. It kills ants out in the open within a few metres, ours as well as wild ones. It starts a fire only where natural lightning would, on ground dry enough to burn. When nothing catches, it says why: the ground is too wet, nothing there will burn, it struck the water, or the ground is too cold, damp or green for the season. The lodge is never struck, and the next bolt takes a moment to build.
Downpour. Half a day of heavy rain falls from a cloud about 110 metres across, where you tap. Its water gathers in the low ground and floods it, as a storm's does, so nests and wild colonies in hollows can lose workers and brood. The rain damps fires, and flooded ground will not burn. One downpour at a time: a new one waits until the last one's water starts to soak away, about a game day on most ground, and Weather says how many hours are left.
In Field notes. Every bolt is noted with where it struck, how many workers it killed and whether a fire started. A downpour is noted when it starts and when it stops, and its flood when the water has gone.

Weather is only for the island. There is no Weather in the ant farm, inside a nest or in Cinematic mode, and the ant farm stays dry.

Battles

Rival colonies fight yours along the borders, and now and then raid an outdoor nest. You can watch these natural encounters and examine their effect on the colony. The ant farm never sends warriors or comes under attack.

Cinematic mode

Cinematic mode hides the controls and labels. Choose Hold this view to keep the camera where you placed it, or Tour the formicarium to follow the colony indoors. Once you open the access port, Tour the whole colony includes the outdoor nests, trails and island. The moving camera follows everyday activity and events as they happen. Observation summaries are optional; leave them off for a view without words.

Start it from More on iPhone, or the film camera in the bar on iPad. It only watches, and never changes your speed. Any touch, or any key, hands the controls back.

Data

Data measures the colony once per simulated day. Open it with Data in the bar, or tap the computer in the lodge: it opens on ANT OS. It opens to Field notes: the record’s first and last counts, its measured change and questions to investigate. At the top, choose what every chart shows: the Formicarium, the Outdoor nests or the Whole colony. Some things are recorded for one part only, such as the ages and jobs of the formicarium's ants, and the chart says so instead of guessing.

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, temperature by depth, soil water and humidity, and brood lost to the habitat.
Ecology: in the farm, aphids and honeydew, mould and springtails, and the greening of the surface; 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.
Field notes: a measured change over the chosen record, its time span and sampling resolution, with links to investigate development, food and climate, and every bolt and downpour you call. Missing history stays unknown.
The keeper's notebook: a flag on the charts for each change you make to the habitat or the feeder, your own notes for any day, and Compare, which shows the four weeks around a change with the averages before and after.
Experiments: after you change the habitat or the feeder, the Lab tells you what to watch, then shows what happened.
Where your ants came from: every nest's card tells how it began, and the colony panel shows the family tree.
The colony's health: in the colony panel, a Growth line says what is holding the colony back, and five tiles show its brood, foragers, tidiness, food and deaths.
The field guide: a page for each species, with the worker, the major, the queen and the male drawn at true size, and chapters on castes, founding, growing up and who does which job. Each says what happens in the wild, shows your colony's numbers beside the real ones, and marks what is simplified or Experimental. Open it from Data, from More on a phone, or from the books in the lodge.
Methods & data: how the numbers are made, the island seed and the simulation seed, and spreadsheet (CSV) files of the daily measurements (for the part you chose, or everything), 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 same island seed and simulation seed, with the same actions, grow the same colony, so you can rerun an experiment with one thing changed, such as the food mix.

Once the colony is full-grown, it tells its story so far: its queens, its age, workers, outdoor nests and its firsts. Your colony so far, at the top of Data, shows it again.

Sound

Sound is quiet and follows where you are looking. Outdoors, most sounds are recordings the developer made and set quiet: wind, rain, insects, water, fire, thunder and some of the birds. The ants' sounds, single songbirds and a few other calls are made by the game as it plays. The recordings are part of the app, so they need no internet, and if one cannot load, the game's own sound plays in its place.

Nature. A breeze through the trees, a thin wind in winter and a hiss through pine needles; light rain blending into a downpour; grasshoppers and crickets; frogs in the wetland, cicadas on dry grassland, a humming, dripping rainforest. On the map, a brook is heard when you are near it, still water only closer in, and the surf along the coast. Inside the lodge and in a nest, the outside is muffled. High over the whole island it is a soft, distant murmur, clearer as you come down.
At the glass. In the lodge you hear a quiet room, with the world faint through its windows. Food lands softly on the soil, and, only when you zoom in very close, ants rustle softly through the soil.
The radio. The only music. It is off until you tap it, and you hear it in the lodge, or on the map near the lodge with its loudspeaker on (see The lodge).
Settings. Sound, Volume, Atmosphere, Nature sounds, soft clicks for the controls, Radio in the lodge, Radio volume and Radio outside too.

iPhone Duo

Ant Laboratory works with iPhone Duo, including its tabletop mode, and it plays on both screens.

Folded. The outer screen has the phone’s layout: the bar along the bottom, the colony panel as a sheet.
Open. The inner screen has the tablet’s layout, upright or sideways. The speed is one button that steps from 1× to 25×, as on a phone, so the bar keeps to one row.
Fold or unfold whenever you like. The game resizes as you do, and the colony carries on where it was: the same moment, the same view, and the panels you had open. Cinematic mode and the full-screen Ant cam carry on too.
Half open on a table. The colony fills the top half, like a window into the ant farm, the island or a nest. The bottom half is one console: the bar along the bottom, and above it the colony panel, Data, Settings, Habitat, Weather or a nest’s card, one at a time. When you set the phone down, the colony panel opens there by itself, and it goes back as it was when you open the phone out or fold it. With no panel open, a live dashboard shows Data’s population chart, the colony’s needs and the latest Field notes: tap the chart to open Data, or a need or a note to go to it. Cards and tips stand just under the fold, above the panel, instead of covering it. Cinematic mode films above the fold, with its captions below.
Half open like a book. Hold it upright, half open, and you keep the tablet’s layout, with the buttons, panels and cards kept off the fold: Data, the colony panel and the cards on the right-hand page, the status line and a nest’s card on the left. The picture of the colony runs across both pages.
Closed during play. Close the phone while a colony is in play, and the outer screen shows just the ant farm, with no controls. A tap brings them back.

The game reads only how far the phone is open and where its fold is, to lay out the screen. It keeps nothing and sends nothing.

Saving and time away

It saves itself. Every colony saves every 20 seconds and whenever you leave the app, on your device. Each save is written in full before it replaces the last one, and the one before is kept too.
While you're away. The colony waits, paused, exactly where you left it, however long you are gone. A welcome card shows where things stand, and nothing happens until you tap Resume. Away for only a minute or two, it just carries on.
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 research behind the game is on The science.

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

Queens live far longer in reality. The game shortens queen life so you get to see successions. Its default is about three simulated years, not a measured natural lifespan. 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. Here an heir, or a daughter the workers raise, can take over, which is Experimental, so a colony can go on longer. Wood ants really do keep many queens.
The farm is only part of the nest. The ant farm holds a few thousand ants at most, each one simulated: up to about 4,500 ants and brood in a colony kept in. 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.
Battles are simplified. Real ants fight with jaws, stings and acid in many small struggles. Here each hour of fighting at the entrances is worked out for the whole front at once, and drawn as ants grappling.
Settling is simplified. Real colonies can take years to settle new ground. Here an outpost settles in months. It is a simple model, not a prediction of what a real colony would do.
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 Data as a way to explore ideas, not as field data.
The habitat is simplified. Mould, springtails, algae, moss and grass are real parts of a tank's life, but how fast they come and how much food a springtail gives are Experimental.