Kenya arrests alleged ant smugglers

What happened

A court in Kenya charged two young Belgian men with wildlife piracy Tuesday for allegedly attempting to smuggle thousands of ants out of the country to exotic pet buyers in Europe and Asia. The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said the "landmark case," and a parallel prosecution of two other alleged ant smugglers, highlighted a "disturbing shift in trafficking patterns — from iconic large mammals to lesser-known yet ecologically critical species."

Who said what

The 19-year-old Belgian suspects were caught with 5,000 live ants, including queens and sought-after Giant African Harvester Ants (messor cephalotes), concealed inside modified test tubes "designed to sustain the ants for up to two months and evade airport security detection," the KWS said. The two other suspects, from Kenya and Vietnam, had about 400 ants.

Authorities said the 5,000 ants had a street value of about 1 million Kenyan shillings ($7,700) but would have provided invaluable ecological benefits to Kenya's forests and other ecosystems. Many people "see ants as a picnic-ruining nuisance," Reuters said, but "aficionados enjoy keeping them in formicariums, transparent cases where they can watch them building complex colonies." Messor cephalotes, native to Kenya, "are many people's dream species," said the British specialist retailer AntsRUs.

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What next?

"We did not come here to break any laws," Belgian defendant Lornoy David told the court, asking for leniency. "By accident and stupidity we did." The court will reconvene next Wednesday