page eight

The Menagerie

The Atlas drew a country and left it empty. This puts animals in it. Today's date decides the founding stock — twenty-six grazers and three things that have worked out grazers are edible — and then nobody is in charge. They eat, they breed, their children come out slightly wrong, and after a few thousand ticks the wrong ones are the only ones left.

Click an animal to read its card. Click bare ground to scatter food there. Space bar pauses.

Climate
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Seed — Ticks —

Census

Alive
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Grazers
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Omnivores
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Hunters
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Plants
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Generation
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Mean size
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Mean speed
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Mean sense
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grazers omnivores hunters plants

Click any animal to read its card.

Living species

NameNowPeak
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Field notes

    What you are actually looking at

    1. 01

      Four numbers

      Every animal carries a genome of four values: body size, top speed, how far it can sense, and how much of its diet is meat. Everything else — its colour, its shape, what it costs to stay alive, how much energy it needs before it can breed — falls out of those four.

    2. 02

      No rules about who wins

      Nothing is scored and nothing is selected for. Animals that run out of energy stop. Animals that gather more than they burn split in two, and the copy is nudged in a random direction. Selection is just what is left over after that.

    3. 03

      Names after the fact

      Species are not designed. When enough drift accumulates that a lineage falls into a different corner of trait space, it gets binned as something new, handed a binomial name, and written into the field notes. The names are invented from the same date seed, so today's fauna is today's only.

    Watch for the usual shapes: grazers overrun the pasture, strip it, and crash; hunters lag one wave behind them; body size creeps up in a lush climate until something faster and hungrier arrives. Push mutation to zero and evolution stops dead — the population still rises and falls, but nothing new is ever tried. Push it past two and lineages tear themselves apart before they can settle. Elsewhere on the site the same date seed raises the land these creatures never get to see, hangs a sky over it, files a report from a town, deals a puzzle and writes a tune.