A man was arrested with more than 2,200 field ants in his luggage at Nairobi’s main airport this week amid an increase in cases of smuggling of the insects in Kenya.
Chinese national Zhang Kequn, 27, was arrested at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on Tuesday as he tried to leave the country, court proceedings showed on Thursday. Immigration officials reported a “stop order” on Zhang’s passport after he evaded arrest in Kenya last year.
Ant aficionados pay large sums of money to maintain colonies in large transparent containers known as formicariums, which provide a real window into the complex structures and movements of the species.
Last year, four men were fined US$7,700 each for trying to smuggle thousands of ants valuable to Kenya’s ecosystem in a case that experts said marked a shift in piracy from ivory to lesser-known species.
Investigators said a search of Zhang’s luggage found 2,238 ants, including 1,948 packed in test tubes and others in three layers of “soft paper”.
They said Zhang had been in Kenya for two weeks and had named three associates who gave him the ants.
