An agent-based model of one colony of the Florida harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex badius, from the day a mated queen lands to the death of the colony. It runs in a web browser and, unchanged, headless in Node for replicate studies.

What the ants do: a claustral queen digs her own shaft and raises the first workers on her reserves; workers dig the nest under local rules, with no ant holding a plan; a one-way, age-based division of labour set by the season of birth, which no shortage reverses; trunk-trail foraging with site fidelity and recruitment; seed storage, opening and germination in the chambers, which is what feeds the larvae; daily weather from the climate normals of the study site, with drought years; nuptial flights after heavy rain; corpse removal; alarm at a disturbance on the foraging ground; and annual nest relocation, in which the store and then the brood are carried along the trail to a new nest the colony digs.

Every value in the model is tagged as measured in this species, borrowed from another ant, or invented, with its source, in a single parameter file. The model is deterministic: one seeded stream per system and a fixed one-minute timestep, so a seed reproduces a run bit for bit in the browser and in Node, which a test pins. A study writes a methods report listing the invented values the results rest on and the acceptance tests the model fails.

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