Two Belgian teenagers have been cuffed for wildlife piracy in Kenya after being found with over 5,000 live messor cephalote ants packed in test tubes bound for Europe, a bust which officials say may be just a small part of a larger trend of trafficking insects out of the country for who the hell knows why someone would want freaking 5,000 ants but there’s a market for it, the AP reports.
Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, both 19, appeared in court Tuesday along with Kenyan Dennis Ng’ang’a and Vietnamese Duh Hung Nguyen, who separately were caught with 400 live ants bound for somewhere in Asia. The Kenya Wildlife Service in a statement that smuggling “not only undermines Kenya’s sovereign rights over its biodiversity but also deprives local communities and research institutions of potential ecological and economic benefits.” It’s unclear which species Ng’ang’a and Nguyen were trying to take but the ones David and Lodewijckx had are a distinctive kind of red harvester ant with large heads apparently prized by ant farm hobbyists.