One colony of the black garden ant

Every ant here is an individual with its own age, hunger, job and memory. The queen lays; nurses carry and feed the brood; diggers take the nest deeper one pellet of soil at a time and pile it round the entrance; foragers milk aphids for honeydew, cut up dead insects and lay scent trails that others follow. Nothing is scripted: the nest you see is the one this colony dug.

Drag

Look around, or orbit the ant you are following

Click an ant

Follow it and read its label. Anything else alive can be followed too

Scroll or pinch

Zoom, from the whole garden down to one ant

X

See through the ground to the nest, or hide it again

P · C

Show the scent trails · drop a biscuit crumb where you are looking

W A S D · Q E

Move freely; hold Shift to go faster

F · N

Hand the camera back to the auto director · next ant with the same job

V · J

Ride along behind the ant you follow · it dances a short jig

Space · 1 2 3 4

Pause · run at 1×, 2×, 4×, 16×

H · ` or F3

Hide the controls · debug tools

How much of this is known

The species is Lasius niger, the common black ant of European gardens, and the outline of its life is well studied: a queen who founds the nest alone and sealed in, workers who nurse when young and forage when old, honeydew from herded aphids, scent trails, the dead carried out to a refuse heap, winged queens and males leaving on a warm still afternoon in high summer. Each card has an Evidence line saying what is solid and what is a guess.

Compressed and simplified: a day lasts four minutes and a year under two hours; an egg becomes a worker in about a quarter of an hour instead of two months; a colony here is hundreds strong where a real one has thousands; tunnels are drawn about twice as wide as they are, and a real pellet of soil is far smaller than the ones carried here. The nest's layout, which chamber is used for what, and most timings are guesses made to be watchable.