GLYPHANTS
Six species of ants have moved into this website. They dig nests in the empty space, then carry the words home one letter at a time. Brush a nest away and the letters come back.
Lab
Found a nest, drop some ants, provoke them, record it, and let them loose on other websites.
This paragraph is bait. Every letter in it can be lifted, carried across the page and pulled underground. Fire ants will come for your cursor. Bullet ants will sting it. Trap-jaw ants snap their jaws and fly. Silver ants are simply faster than you.
Infest any site
Drag this to your bookmarks bar, open any website, then click it. A colony moves in. Click it again to send them home. Some sites block bookmarklets, so it won’t work everywhere.
Launch log
What the colony is doing before launch day. Nothing is deployed yet.
Telemetry
Live readings from the colony on this page, since you opened it.
Specimen
Field notes on the six species currently living in the DOM.
Description
Formica litterarum, the letter ant, is a small six-legged forager first recorded in October 2026 carrying a lowercase e out of a paragraph. Like real ants it walks on an alternating tripod: three legs on the ground, three in the air.[1] Colonies dig their nests in whitespace and build the mound from the soil they excavate.[2]
Letters are carried overhead and taken underground. Spaces are never touched. Nobody knows why.
Behaviour
Each nest belongs to one species, and each species answers the cursor differently. The red fire ant runs toward it and bites, the way real Solenopsis invicta swarms an intruder.[3] The bullet ant rears up, lunges and stings. Its real sting sits at the top of the Schmidt sting pain index.[4]
The trap-jaw ant holds its mandibles open and snaps them shut so fast it launches itself away. Real Odontomachus do exactly this.[5] The Saharan silver ant doesn’t fight; it is one of the fastest runners of any ant, covering up to 855 mm a second.[6] The leafcutter carries the biggest letters, held up like leaf fragments.
Habitat
Mostly the DOM, in the margins of long articles. Specimens have been seen on other websites through the bookmarklet. The colony is messy, but not destructive: every letter goes back where it came from when the nest is razed.
References
- Field notes. Formicarium Lab Log (in-universe). Entry
#0001: “Specimen observed lifting a glyph twice its size”. - Hölldobler, B.; Wilson, E. O. (1990). The Ants. Harvard University Press.
- Tschinkel, W. R. (2006). The Fire Ants. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
- Schmidt, J. O. (2016). The Sting of the Wild. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Patek, S. N. et al. (2006). “Multifunctionality and mechanical origins: ballistic jaw propulsion in trap-jaw ants”. PNAS 103 (34): 12787–12792.
- Pfeffer, S. E. et al. (2019). “High-speed locomotion in the Saharan silver ant, Cataglyphis bombycina”. Journal of Experimental Biology 222.
Token
Not launched yet. The colony is still digging.
| Name | Glyphants |
|---|---|
| Ticker | $GLYPH |
| Chain | TBA |
| Paired with | TBA |
| CA | not deployed yet |