Kenya's Ant Smuggling Bust Exposes Lucrative Underground Trade

Kenyan police who raided a national park guesthouse earlier in April aimed not to bust elephant tusk or rhino horn poachers, but a more esoteric ring trading a much smaller, more lucrative item by weight: queen ants.

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NAIROBI — Kenyan police who raided a national park guesthouse earlier in April aimed not to bust elephant tusk or rhino horn poachers, but a more esoteric ring trading a much smaller, more lucrative item by weight: queen ants.

Two Belgian teenagers — David Lornoy and Seppe Lodewijckx—were arrested for wildlife trafficking at Jane Guesthouse in Naivasha, on the edge of Kenya's Hell's Gate National Park.

They — along with a Vietnamese man named Duh Hung Nguyen and a Kenyan national named Dennis Nganga who were also accused of ant trafficking — pleaded guilty and will be sentenced on May 7, a magistrate said on April 23.

Kenyan prosecutors have valued the seizures of queens taken from giant African harvester ant colonies at about 1.2 million Kenyan shillings (S$12,120).

Depending on the number and variety of each species found, however, Reuters calculated the haul would have been worth as much as US$1 million had it reached European shores.

“It's like cocaine,” said Dr Dino Martins, director of the Turkana Basin Institute and one of Kenya's leading insect experts.