Poor Clef. I understand why the ants would be wary of an ant nest beetle, but I feel like I remember there being mention of accommodations for species that normally prey on other insects in some way. You know, so they don't have to eat people. Have ant nest beetle macrovolutes ever even been an actual problem for them, or are they just -that- paranoid, where they'll attack species whose protocules prey on theirs, regardless of how the macrovolute versions behave?
Clef's species was socially parasitic on another species of ant entirely, not the yellow crazy ants. This will be gone into in more detail eventually, but I will say this now: The ants' distaste for myrmecophiles has nothing to do with any kind of danger they might pose (the ants appropriated all sorts of dangerous macrovolutes and demivolutes to work for them), but sheerly the audacity of being "useless freeloaders." Even more so, the audacity of being useless freeloaders with the ability to *trick* them.
And the accommodation for carnivorous insects, as we saw in this episode, was just eating arthropods (like isopods) that aren't people (that is, not insects or arachnids).
Of course, this is only a stipulation of the *Swarms.* The Swarms bend the knee to the ants in all regards...and as we saw, *anyone* may be "processed for protein."
