Kenyan prosecutors on Monday arraigned a local man accused of supplying live ants to foreign traffickers as authorities try to stop the insects being smuggled out of the country.
Kenya’s office of the director of public prosecutions said in a post on X that Charles Mwangi was arraigned at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport court.
Police conducted a search of his house and recovered 1,000 unpackaged live garden ants, 113 live garden ants packaged in modified syringes, and 503 empty syringes.
Prosecutors believe Mwangi supplied ants to Chinese national Zhang Kequn, who was arrested last week at Nairobi’s main airport with more than 2,000 live garden ants in his luggage.
They also linked Mwangi to a consignment of ants seized in Bangkok on March 10 that originated from the Kenyan port city of Mombasa and said he had ties to accomplices in several Kenyan counties.
Last year, four men were fined $7,700 (R130,000) each for trying to traffic thousands of ants out of Kenya in a case experts said signalled a shift in biopiracy from trophies such as elephant ivory to lesser-known species.
Ant aficionados pay large sums to maintain colonies in large transparent vessels known as formicariums, which offer a literal window into the species’ complex social structures and behaviours.
Reuters
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