More than 2,000 live ants smuggled in luggage, Kenyan authorities say after man’s arrest

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NAIROBI -- A man was arrested with more than 2,200 live garden ants in his luggage at Nairobi’s main airport this week amid a rise in cases of smuggling of the insects in Kenya.

Chinese national Zhang Kequn, 27, was arrested at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on Tuesday while he was trying to leave the country, court filings seen by Reuters on Thursday showed. Immigration officials flagged a “stop order” on Zhang’s passport after he evaded arrest in Kenya last year.

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.

Last year four men were fined $7,700 each for trying to traffic thousands of ants valuable to Kenya’s ecosystem in a case that experts said signaled a shift in biopiracy from trophies like elephant ivory to lesser-known species.

Investigators said a search of Zhang’s luggage recovered 2,238 ants, including 1,948 packed in test tubes and the rest in three rolls of “soft tissue papers.”

They said Zhang had been in Kenya for two weeks and had mentioned three accomplices who supplied him with the ants.

The Kenya Wildlife Service told the court that it needed more time to complete investigations, including examining an iPhone and a MacBook recovered from Zhang.

The wildlife service said a similar consignment of ants had been seized in Bangkok on Tuesday that originated from Kenya, indicating the existence of a widespread and organized ant-smuggling network.

(Reporting by Humphrey Malalo; Writing by Vincent Mumo Nzilani; Editing by Alexander Winning and Kevin Buckland)