In two separate but related incidents, Kenyan authorities have arrested four suspects for illegally possessing and attempting to smuggle some 5,300 ants valued at about 1.2 million Kenyan shillings ($9,250), destined for the exotic pet trade.

The ants, which included the giant harvester ants (Messor cephalotes), were being trafficked to Asia and Europe.

In the first incident, authorities arrested two 19-year-old Belgian nationals, Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, and seized around 5,000 live queen ants stored in about 2,244 test tubes. The seizure was valued at around 1 million shillings ($7,700), prosecutor Allen Mulama told local media Citizen Digital.

In the second incident, a Vietnamese national, Duh Hung Nguyen, and a Kenyan national, Dennis Ng’ang’a, were arrested. Officers found them in possession of 300 ants packed in around 140 tubes and valued at 200,000 shillings ($1,550).

All four suspects have pleaded guilty to charges of illegal possession and trafficking of wildlife and are awaiting trial at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) court in Nairobi, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), the country’s national wildlife conservation agency, said in a statement. The case has now been adjourned to April 23 to let authorities determine the exact number of test tubes containing ants.

Photographs shared by KWS show the suspected traffickers had packed the ants in test tubes and syringes stuffed with cotton wool to sustain the ants for two months. These tubes and syringes were modified to evade security scanners at the airport, indicating “a premeditated and well-executed trafficking operation,” the KWS statement said.

Giant harvester ants are native to Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia and live in large colonies of about 5,000 ants. They primarily eat seeds, which they collect and store in their nests, thereby playing an important ecological role as seed dispersers and soil engineers.

The ants’ complex colony-building skills and unique behavior make them popular in the exotic pet trade, KWS said. Collectors keep them in specialized artificial ant habitats known as formicariums. Giant harvester ant queens are widely sold online, with traders listing them as “dream species” or “hot” items for sale, driving the illegal trade of wild-caught ants.

The species isn’t covered by CITES, the convention that governs the international wildlife trade. It also hasn’t been assessed for the IUCN Red List, so its population trends are unknown. However, KWS said that smuggling the ants amounts to biopiracy by violating the consent and benefit-sharing rules of the Nagoya Protocol, to which Kenya is a party.

“Invertebrates are not ‘sexy’ and fluffy — and are under-represented in international legislation,” Sandra Altherr, co-founder of German NGO Pro Wildlife, told Mongabay. “This is another case of a non-CITES species that is nationally protected and illegally sourced in its country of origin but can be legally sold in the EU.”

These latest seizures aren’t the first in Kenya: In 2023, authorities arrested three suspects for smuggling giant harvester ants worth 300,000 shillings ($2,300) to France and China.

Banner image of giant harvester ants by sandradennis via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).