So, what’s the incentive to do this? I read the article lol.
Money.
The contraband included giant African harvester ants, which are valued by some UK dealers at up to £170 ($220) each.
One queen is enough to seed an ant farm. Those are just particularly interesting ants, and hard to get. It is best to just have local ants for farms because then you can release them if necessary, but keeping interesting and exotic ants is more interesting than local types you probably see all the time, especially in areas without a great variety of local ants. 250 dollars for an exotic pet is pretty cheap really.
From what i gather, because they are rare and pretty cool. People will spend thousands on rare fish for their aquarium hobby, I could definitely see ant colony nerds paying that for a rare and apparently quite large african species.
Why the hell are people paying that much for ants? Just drop some sugar on the floor and you’ll get tons of them for free!
Anti-ant antecedents antagonize contrabandits near Antananarivo (relatively speaking).
The Belgian teens? That was a perfectly phrased headline, right here on c/nottheonion:
“Belgian teens arrested with 5,000 smuggled ants as Kenya warns of changing trafficking trends”
Ants… some people would rob their mother for the Ants
