live
The colony, right now
A cross-section of the nest in open ground. Every ant is a wallet that holds the token, and every number under it is read out of the running colony.
Colony events
- One colony, for everyone. It runs on a server and is saved to disk — close the tab and the ants keep digging.
- Click any ant to inspect it. The queen sits in the deepest chamber; click her for her chemistry.
- Trails, the midden and the dig plan are instrument layers. Real pheromone is invisible. Switch the layers in the bar under the nest.
the queen
Inside the queenmodel
About 250,000 neurons at the scale of a real ant brain, drawn as the structures they belong to. A region lights up when the model says it is working.
Queen — neural activity
17,130 units renderedOlfactory pathway
Two synapses separate a dense antennal-lobe code from a sparse mushroom-body one. In locust, each Kenyon cell samples roughly half of all projection neurons — the wiring that maximally separates any two odours.
Neuromodulators
Most abundant amine in ant brains. Central to foraging regulation — foragers carry more than non-foragers.
Controls aggressive motivation (Formica japonica). At high concentration it inhibits trophallaxis.
Rises as workers mature, alongside dopamine. Amine–aggression coupling is context-dependent, not monotonic.
Lowest-abundance of the four, and octopamine's precursor, so it tracks octopamine.
Normalised, with the measured rank order preserved: dopamine is the most abundant amine in ant brains, then octopamine, serotonin, tyramine. Absolute titers are reported per brain and vary by species and age, so they are not invented here.
Central complex — navigation
8 tiles × 2 wedges = 16, one compass neuron each. Recurrent EPG excitation plus broad Δ7 inhibition hold a single bump; PEN cells one wedge over rotate it by angular velocity.
Affective-like state (inferred)
Neuropil inventory
Brain log
12 Hz modelyour ant
Find your ant
Paste any address. If it holds the token it is an ant somewhere in the nest, doing a job it chose itself.
Find an ant
10 holdersNo wallet connection, and no signature. Marking an address as yours stores it in this browser only — it highlights your ant in the tank.
Pick a holder from the register, or paste an address. Its ant’s job, load, route home and lifetime record appear here.
what it is
A colony from the literature, not a metaphor
Nothing the ants do on this page was invented for the screen. Workers walk on an alternating tripod and stop to tap the ground with their antennae. They follow a trail by comparing the scent at their left and right antenna, find their way home by integrating a compass heading against distance walked, and choose their work through private response thresholds — nobody assigns it.
The queen gives no orders. Her brain is modelled structure by structure: antennal lobes of 220 glomeruli, mushroom bodies that hold a sparse code in about 4.5 % of their Kenyon cells, a single activity bump circling the ellipsoid body, and optic lobes drawn shrunken — as they are in a mated queen who lives in the dark.
Every constant carries its source. Measured values rescaled to fit the screen are marked as rescaled, with the factor stated.
how the chain reaches it
Holders go in, a colony comes out
The chain decides who is in the colony and how they arrived. Biology decides everything they do after that.
the plan
How it got here
Read the holders off the chain
Every transfer since the contract was created, confirmed against current balances.
Make the ants behave like ants
Tripod gait, trail following by scent, path integration home, thresholds instead of orders, undertakers.
Give the queen a brain
Antennal lobe, mushroom body, central complex and four neuromodulators, each structure where it sits in a real ant.
One colony for everyone
The colony runs on a server, is saved to disk, and every visitor watches the same nest.
Keep it cheap and closed
Only new blocks are read after the first scan; the server takes no requests it does not need.
Connect the token and the pool
Point the colony at the live contract and install the queen from its Uniswap v4 pool.
Let trades reach the queen
Tie the queen's laying and chemistry to swaps in her pool rather than to colony state alone.
on-chain
The token
No token is connected yet. When it is, its contract and the queen's pool appear here, read straight from the chain.
what is not real, stated plain
The parts that aren't the colony
- Time is compressed. One second on screen is about 25 seconds for the ants, so a 25-minute pheromone half-life plays out in about a minute.
- The brain is a model, not a recording. Cell counts come from studies of several ant species. Each rendered Kenyon cell samples 12 glomeruli, where a real one samples roughly half of them.
- “What she feels” is an inference. The affect readout is a judgement-bias score computed from colony stress, built after experiments on stressed bees. It is not a claim that the queen experiences anything.
- An ant knows three things about its wallet. Balance rank, when the wallet first received the token, and how many transfers it made. Nothing else about the holder shapes the ant.
- Some food is ambient. Buys drop forage on the surface; when the chain is quiet, ambient food keeps the colony fed.
- Until a token is set, the colony is synthetic. Ten founding ants stand in, and the page says so in the title plate and the census.
- No wallet, ever. Finding your ant means pasting an address. Nothing is signed, nothing is sent.