Oh, tropical ants
Well , should have expected, they have some strange ants.... Still I'd prefer firejacketsized diggers with some way to transport very small pieces of ore to the surface via equally small tunnels, that can collapse as much as they want... Then we may process what is mined. That's a slow, but a safe way to mine
Don't get me wrong, while I dislike that mole for thematic reasons, I admit that it is a great tool. Tool in the hands of experienced miners.
Undeground housing, transport tunnels, mining, some hilarious military things all can be done with it, especially if we'll have like 10 of them. But without human or dwarven intelligence, all that is either impossible or will have much lower quality
And that moles can't do any delicate job...
What I like - potential military uses for it. But mining... I am afraid that it will create more problems then good. We may wait few days to see how will it behave. But I expect problems from that
We don't need to enter any negotiation about it until we build the fortress, so mining may wait. But deal with dwarves will let us mine and process manarack much more effectively then alone. Should we use many digging animals or not
Using delicate, small scale, ecology friendly mining options with small miners is another option I'd consider... while using the mole for large scale tunneling\combat... because extensive mining have tendency to hurt life