Two Ant Colonies Race. We Read Their Minds.

Two ant colonies race on one lawn, in a real computer simulation. Most ants on day 100 wins. And we can read their minds. Every bubble you see is a real moment inside one simulated ant: what she smelled, found, lost or feared. Real simulation. Real thoughts. Our words. Hazel is amber. Iris is blue. Neither knows the other exists. A wild strawberry lies unfound in the grass for 60 days. Then we make it rain. Real ant facts in this film: • A founding queen feeds her first babies from her own flight muscles. • Floodplain ants build living rafts with every egg and larva on the bottom. The babies float better than the workers. • Every colony has its own smell. Ants read it with their antennae and react to strangers. • Ants carrying a big load together line up their pulls with the way it is already moving. (Our ants do a simpler version.) Sources: • Founding queens: AntWiki https://antwiki.org/wiki/Colony_Found... • Living rafts: Purcell et al. 2014, PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.... • Colony smell: University of California https://www.universityofcalifornia.ed... • Carrying together: Gelblum et al. 2015, Nature Communications https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... TINY EMPIRES: real simulations, told as films. We control the weather. The ants control everything else. #antcolony #simulation #ants