Booming ant trade poses ecological risks as smuggling outpaces global regulation

In Kenyan courtrooms over the past eighteen months, judges have examined an unusual form of contraband: thousands of ants sealed into containers no larger than a fist. Each time, wildlife officers discovered them during routine baggage checks at the airport. Each time, the insects were queens of the Messor Cephalotes species—the Giant African Harvester Ant—a creature that commands more than two hundred euros on the black market. A single breeding female can be worth more than the monthly wage of many people in the region where she was taken.

The cases have multiplied. In April of last year, a Chinese national received a one-year prison sentence for attempting to export the ants, a crime the judge called biopiracy. Months earlier, four men calling themselves the "Ant Gang" were stopped at the same airport with fifty-five hundred queens destined for Europe. Two of them were nineteen-year-old Belgians. Each was fined five thousand euros. Dino Martins, one of Africa's foremost ant researchers, has been called to the airport repeatedly to identify the seized insects. "I was shocked," he said, "not only by the sheer number of ants, but also because they were queen ants." These queens possess wings. They are meant to fly from their nests and establish new colonies. When collectors dig them from the ground at this critical moment, they sever a fundamental process of ecological renewal. In Kenya's savannahs, ants do more than build societies—they transport grass seeds across the landscape, regenerating the land itself. Remove the queens, and you remove the future.

In Europe, keeping ants has become a hobby, particularly among young people. Michael Meier, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, began keeping them while at university because they demanded almost nothing from him. "With ants, it doesn't really matter whether I feed them today or tomorrow," he said. At his peak, he maintained nearly thirty colonies in a single room, each housed in a glass terrarium where a queen would lay eggs and build a civilization from scratch. Today he keeps four. What draws enthusiasts to exotic species, particularly those from Africa, is simple: they do not hibernate. A keeper in Berlin or Brussels can watch them work through winter, can observe their architecture and behavior in all seasons. Online shops make the transaction frictionless. A few clicks, a few euros, and a box arrives in the mail containing living creatures that will breed for years.

The sellers operate in a legal void. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora—CITES, the international agreement that governs wildlife commerce—does not classify ants as threatened. Their trade is therefore neither prohibited nor regulated at the global level. Kenya bans the export of all wildlife, but ants are not elephants or rhinoceroses. They fit easily into a pocket, a piece of checked luggage, an envelope. Unlike ivory, they are alive and can survive weeks in transit. The profit margins are substantial. The risks, compared to drug trafficking or arms smuggling, are negligible.

Russell Gray, working with an international team investigating online wildlife sales for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, examined more than sixty platforms last year. His team catalogued two hundred sixty-six thousand advertisements with prices. The combined value exceeded sixty-six million dollars. That figure excluded insects entirely. "If we looked at the entire online wildlife trade," Gray concluded, "we would probably be talking about a market worth billions." Chris Shepherd, a biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity, sees in these numbers a threshold being crossed. Once a species begins commanding high prices, organized criminal networks take notice. The ant trade has already crossed that threshold. Shepherd has written open letters to CITES urging regulation. He is not primarily concerned with the hobby itself but with what happens when the hobby fails—when a keeper loses interest or moves, when a colony escapes or is deliberately released.

In southern Germany, the consequences are already visible. Entire colonies of North African large gland ants have nested inside electrical distribution boxes, causing power and internet outages. The problem has grown severe enough that local government representatives from Austria, Switzerland, and southern Germany convened at an ant conference in the summer of 2025 to share strategies. Climate change is making Central Europe warmer and less frozen, creating conditions these ants can survive. Most invasive ants probably arrive through plant imports rather than the pet trade, Shepherd acknowledges. But the hobby market poses its own risk. No regulation can guarantee that a colony will never escape or be released. Meier, who participates in online forums where these debates occur, advises other keepers to either transfer their colonies to other enthusiasts or euthanize them humanely rather than setting them free. For Shepherd, such voluntary measures fall short. As long as the international ant trade remains largely unregulated, it will continue to pose a risk—one that grows larger each time a queen arrives in Europe and begins to breed.