Don’t go putting our ants in your pants
It doesn’t matter how Belgian you are, you can’t have any more African colonies.
Christine Mungai in Nairobi
A Nairobi court this week sentenced four convicted ant smugglers from Belgium, Vietnam and Kenya to each pay a $7,700 fine, or spend one year in jail, for attempting to smuggle 5,440 Giant African Harvester Queen Ants out of the country.
The cases marks a shift from trafficking iconic species like elephants and rhinos to small creatures that are just as ecologically important, according to Reuters.
Although the rulings were delivered on the same day, they involved two unrelated cases. One case involved a man from Vietnam, Duh Heng Nguyen, who was recruited by a wildlife trafficking network to collect around 400 queen ants from a Kenyan contact, Dennis Nganga. Both Nguyen and Nganga pleaded guilty after authorities busted the operation.
The other case involved two Belgian teenagers who had collected more than 5,000 of the rare queen ants, worth more than $900,000. They were connected to a group who described themselves as “Ant Gang”. The teenagers, who pleaded guilty, were preparing to smuggle the ants out of the country in syringes when their Nairobi guest house was raided by police.
The Belgians described themselves as ant enthusiasts and claimed ignorance: “We are not criminals … we are naïve and just want to go home,” they told the court last month.
Samuel Mutua, a wildlife crime expert at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, was not buying this defence. “Irrespective of their age, they were able to get a lot of ants,” he told Reuters.
Magistrate Njeri Thuku situated the crime in the context of centuries of extractive colonial practices, especially the exploitation of Africa’s natural resources.
The trafficking of insects as part of a colonial project is not without precedent, she noted. In the 16th century, Spanish conquistadors turned the cochineal insect – used by the Aztecs to produce a brilliant red dye – into a global commodity. The dye, known as carmine, was so prized in Europe that it rivalled gold in value. Producing just one kilogramme required over 150,000 insects. Spain guarded the insect’s origin to maintain a monopoly.
In her other ruling, on Nguyen and Nganga’s case, Thuku said the scheme had “the hallmarks of illegal wildlife trade and possibly biopiracy”. The ants, she noted, are more valuable by weight than ivory or rhino horn.
Entomological imperialism
The global demand for ants – particularly as exotic pets – has surged in recent years, driven by the appeal of unusual, low-maintenance creatures. Among the most sought-after are queen ants, which command high prices online.
Messor cephalotes, or Giant African Harvester Ants, the species at the centre of the Naivasha case, are especially rare. According to the Kenya Wildlife Service, this species of garden ants have “a very restricted distribution range” and are only known in East Africa.
The ant queens were likely destined to be sold to hobbyists in Europe, Asia and North America, who like to observe ant colonies grow in large, transparent vessels called formicariums. Queens are especially valuable because they alone can reproduce and create a colony from scratch.
Online listings on sites like Ants R Us and QualityAnts.nl show an average price of $190 per queen.
This price does not include the potential cost of removing queen ants from fragile ecosystems. Magistrate Thuku highlighted the significance of ants in Kenya’s biodiversity, and framed the practice of ant smuggling as “genocidal harvesting”.
Watching a colony grow from one queen into a colony of thousands is “oddly therapeutic”, the ruling stated, yet there’s arguably a strange emptiness, rooted in colonial logic, in extracting such intricate life from the wild only to observe it behind glass. It seems that the wildlife smugglers took the concept of an ant colony a little too literally.
Thank you for sharing this story! It's incredibly interesting and thought-provoking and I'm interested in looking into the illegal insect trade further, as it seems it's not as well known as the illegal trade in larger species 🌱