New Delhi: A Kenyan court on Wednesday ordered a Chinese man to pay a fine of 1 million shillings ($7,746) and gave him a 12-month jail term for trying to smuggle live ants out of the country. The ruling comes after a spate of such cases in Kenya of ant-trafficking have come out.
Chinese man held
The case pertains to a Chinese national named Zhang Kequn who was arrested last month at Nairobi’s main international airport with more than 2,200 live garden ants in his luggage. “Noting the increasing and rising cases of dealing in large quantities of garden ants and the negative ecological side effects of massive harvesting, there is a need for a stiff deterrent,” magistrate Irene Gichobi said of the arrest.
Zhang initially pleaded not guilty to the charges, only to later change his plea to guilty. Subsequently his lawyer has now said that he would appeal against this sentence.
Charles Mwangi, a Kenyan man, has also been charged in the same case. He is accused of supplying the ants to Zhang. His case was not heard concurrently with Zhang’s, and he has pleaded not guilty and is out on bail.
Why the smuggling of ants?
This is not an isolated incident, a trend of such trafficking is being increasingly observed in recent years. According to wildlife experts, it signals a shift in biosmuggling from trophies like elephant ivory to lesser-known species.
Last year, four men were fined 1 million shillings each for trying to traffic thousands of ants in Kenya. This trend reflects a new surge of developing markets in places such as China where enthusiasts have paid large sums to maintain ant colonies in large transparent vessels, allowing them to study the species’ complex social structures and behaviors.
Chinese nationals too have been smuggling large numbers of live queen ants, mainly the giant African harvester ant species Messor cephalotes, from East Africa, especially Kenya. The primary market demand stems from the booming global hobby of ant-keeping, for enthusiasts mainly residing in China, Europe, and the United States.