The Ants Should be Killed

They enter from a crack by the window. Scouts filter in periodically, looking for water or cheap calories. There's nothing obvious there, so this is a routine seasonal mission or desperation.

When they find whatever they're looking for, they will quickly send the signal and a swarm will descend. Even if wiped out, stragglers will keep checking for days. Some will recognize the total destruction of their army and retreat to temporary safety, from which they will begin new target acquisition.

Any positive signal encourages further predation. You have to cut them off with extreme prejudice to keep them from advancing upon you, or else you will be dealing with all the demands they bring to new territories for years to come.

This requires you to keep top cleanliness, stay aware of incursions, and to have a good supply of poisons to feed them when boundaries have been breached.

They do not mean harm, only personal advantage, yet their presence harms. They would love to have your food, space, and water, yet you would not want to have them taking your food, space, and water. How to negotiate? Only by exclusion.

No means of reason amounts to anything. So it is with reasoning and pleas.

In their place you would do the same for the chance at opportunistic encroachment. However, the positions are not exchanged and you do not wish to be encroached upon. Understanding the desire they see does not mean you yield to it; quite the contrary! You understand clearly their rapacious glare.

Every new entry to a system reorganizes and rescales order, changing its function and quality. The accommodation of new insects within a civilized space is not an improvement except to the invading insects, and thus warrants a crushing opposition.