My colony and I were settling into our new habitat nicely. Very nicely indeed, since you ask. Oh, you didn't? Well, too bad. We are here, and here to stay, if we have anything to do with it.

Some would say that shifting house or environment is a messy, tiresome task, filling up boxes with stuff, cleaning as you go. Well that's what you humans do, anyway. This is not the case in the moth world.

I'm a pantry moth, and I'm facing eviction and extermination.

We had been quite thoughtful as to where we land, settle and take charge of our environment.

We're small, but we hold our ground, or cupboard, as it were. There are some pantries that are loaded with packaged food, some left open even by the smallest of margins but big enough for us to flutter into unassumingly and have a good poke around. When the chosen open package of dry food or any open container meets all the criteria on our check-list, the females in our colony lay their eggs. They don't do it by halves either, they lay about 400 eggs. Our girls spin a fine, intricate lacey web and the eggs to grow into fine looking maggots. This may sound really disgusting to you, but it's our life cycle.

Anyway, moving on. We had made ourselves plentiful and busy with reproducing and nesting and generally trashing your once-tidy pantry. All looked pretty good from where we sat quietly on the shelves, walls and top of your cupboards. But the word in the kitchen was the human habitants were not too pleased with our occupation. They had a plan in place to remove us all. Quiet panic set in through our ranks, waiting to see what events would unfold.

The human habitant 'flung wide the gates' into the pantry and moved in with her attack. With the pantry emptied, the first round of 'ammo' was the hot soapy water.

The second round was the offensive smell of white vinegar. If that wasn't enough, she bought in the heavy artillery with the peppermint oil! We didn't stand a chance. We had many casualties, nests destroyed, relations exterminated.

So now we are homeless, again. The same thing happened at our last dwelling, strangely enough. A moth could get a complex from all this negativity. It's a moth's life, and a cruel, cruel world.