I study ecological concepts, including those related to patterns of diversity and distribution, mutualisms and dispersal. Often, I use ants as a kind of model system. The ecological concepts I study are general and can ultimately lead to practical insight. But none of these concepts are practically important in a direct sense. And so, when I get a phone call from someone about my research or if I get asked a question at a dinner party, it will be, 900 times out of 901, “What do I do about ants in my kitchen?” The 901st time the question will be, instead, “What do I do about ants in my bathroom?” or the slightly embarrassed variant on a theme, “So, my friend has ants in his kitchen…”

To preempt future dinner table questions about kitchen ants, drain ants, ants in the bedroom, ants in the pants, ants in the plants or ants in the Cheerios, I’ll offer here a quick answer to what you might do about the ants in your kitchen. Maybe I’ll also email this out before dinner parties.

If you have ants in your kitchen, they are hungry or thirsty. They are not, in all likelihood, lonely. If they seem lonely, you are projecting. If they seem to be hungry, you might offer them a little food. They will probably go running back to the colony, laying a trail that says, “food, food, food, food, and then, food.” Other ants will come back the trail looking for the mentioned food. If they don’t respond this way to the food you offer, try a different kind of food. Many ants-particularly those you are likely to find in your kitchen-love shortbread cookies, but will also enjoy a piece of tuna fish or chicken. Ants don’t really like tofu.

If nothing happens with the food, offer water. Ants get dehydrated. They have little pores in the sides of their bodies they use to exchange gas—AKA breath—and water escapes out of those pores. For ants without hard bodies, water can actually escape out of the exoskeleton as well. Put the water in a small dish. If the ants come up to the dish, bend their head down and appear to drink and then run back to the nest to recruit more ants, they were thirsty.

Modest alotments of food and water is likely to keep your ants happy and then you can just treat them, from then on, like a very low maintenance dog. Pet them if you like, though gently. Talk to them in the morning. Your dog does not understand what you are saying either, so there may not be a huge difference. Teach them tricks by laying out circles of sugar and seeing if they will follow the circles. They can be fun and lovely half-wild pets. Ants offer the added advantage over a dog of being almost completely unstudied. The most common ants in houses in North America are the odorous house ant (Their name suggests a foul odor, but it is actually something along the lines of lemon pledge, which may have been what you were going for in your kitchen anyway.). We know how to kill Odorous house ants ( Tapinoma sessile), but we know little else about them. Watch them for a while. Take notes. Do experiments. You will, over Cheerios and coffee and shared Pecan Sandies, gain knowledge beyond what anyone on else on earth has. We are, collectively, that ignorant.

Although the odorous house ant is the most likely ant to find in your kitchen, there are many other options. If you have something else, it is likely to be even more poorly studied. The list of potential species numbers in the hundreds, or, if some of you readers are in the tropics, thousands. The list is a tangle of either Latin or common names, depending on your preference. For the common names you will find wood ants, thatch ants, sugar ants, crazy ants, saddle ants, green headed ants and many, many others. As a study by Marko Pecaravic at Columbia University has recently shown, even a street median on Broadway can hold a dozen species of ants.

Of course, what most people are looking for when they ask me about ants in their kitchen is what kind of pesticide they can use for kitchen ants. There are probably good answers to that question. I don’t know what they are. My wife, I’m sure, would rather I got rid of the ants from our kitchen using whatever means necessary, but my daughter likes the ants. She offers them food on a daily basis, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. The ants, for the most part, do no harm. Very few of the ants that make it into your house sting (odorous house ants lack a sting, for example, and have mouths too small to bite you). It is sometimes reported that ants can carry diseases in hospitals, but this is not very likely in your home, unless you leave garbage piles out around your house in which case I’m not sure that is the ants fault. And in any case, if you were to swab your neighbor and your neighborhood ant for germs the ant will come out looking very clean. Your neighbors are grubby, trust me, and yet no one ever asks me at dinner parties how to get their neighbor out of their kitchen, though this may just be because I'm often the neighbor.

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