The Independent – Authorities found 5,000 smuggled ants that two Belgian teenagers planned to ship overseas to exotic pet markets.
Kenya Wildlife Service officers uncovered the ants in a guesthouse in the western part of the country.
Two Belgian teenagers, Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, intended to ship the ants to Europe and Asia.
The seized ants were mostly Messor cephalotes, a large red harvester species from East Africa. Ants R Us, a site that sells to ant collectors, prices Messor cephalotes at around $265 per colony.
David said, “We did not come here to break any laws. By accident and stupidity, we did.” The two teens likely don’t realize how dangerous an invasive ant species is to an ecosystem.
What’s concerning about the ant market?
A 2023 paper on the ant trade, published in the journal Biological Conservation, explained that “the most sought-after ants have higher invasive potential.”
Invasive species topple ecosystems. They push out native creatures, deplete resources, and alter habitats. This reduces biodiversity, threatening food and water security, climate stability, and disease control.
Removing species from their natural habitat also disrupts those ecosystems. Every living being, from bacteria to apex predators, plays a vital role, and ants are especially important.
Messor cephalotes
AntWiki: The Ants — Online
A very distinctive East African species, cephalotes is one of the only two known African forms in which the gaster is strongly sculptured.
The other, Messor regalis, has much coarser sculpture, as noted in the key, and also differs by having the propodeum always bidentate or bispinose, a feature only very rarely developed in cephalotes.
Beside this the anterior clypeal margin, always concave in cephalotes, is shallowly convex and irregular in regalis, and the sides of the head, hairless in cephalotes, have distinct standing hairs in regalis, at least behind the eyes.
