this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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So, what's the incentive to do this? I read the article lol.
Ant hobby is really huge. People who keep ants will collect several colonies simultaneously.
Money.
The contraband included giant African harvester ants, which are valued by some UK dealers at up to £170 ($220) each.
But why are they so valuable in the first place? Lol
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.
So it does sort of go back to hobbyism, I could get like a zoological institute or a university having a use for them for study or something, but yeah, I don't get people wanting to keep non native species like that as a hobby.
You don't collect $1.1 million worth of ants for a hobby. Even if he has 5000 "friends" on his Belgian ant hobby board, I doubt he can show that they were just going to cover his collection expenses. In all likelihood, these would have been shipped all over the globe for years to come.
Oh yeah definitely, I'm just saying that even though dude(s) is/are going way hardcore and doing illegal stuff for his interests, it at least abuts against hobbyism because hobbyists would be the ones eventually purchasing them.
This is why we have CITES and total trade bans against things like ivory.
Doesn't matter if the elephant died of natural causes and the herd moved on before the ivory was collected, sale of any ivory encourages poaching.
Yeah I mean it's rotten all the way through, is what I'm saying.
Well, it seems obvious but some people don't have hobbies I guess. I don't keep ants, but I definitely see why someone would enjoy raising a colony of ants that are so different from what we normally have and why would be interesting. Keeping an ant colony healthy is a rewarding challenge and those ants have different behaviors and body types to regular ants. Look at that chonker of a queen, she is pretty beautiful on her own.
I would posit that potentially releasing invasive species or pets that won't survive the new localle crosses past the hobbyist/enthusiast lines towards villainny or menace. Might as well call arson a hobby.
The best practice is to keep local ants. Almost all ant keepers suggest doing that. Also invasive ants that already have a foothold in the area is fine, like keeping fire ants for instance, though one should be more vigilant about keeping them in captivity and never risk letting them free. I would suppose new invasive should be only kept by expert keepers. I wouldn't even say those experts should be zoos, just well trained. Part of that training might be that they would decide not to keep them at all. So there is that. Some ants can't climb as well as others and are easier to set up confinements for. Some ants are nigh impossible to keep in or out...
That's what I'm saying lol like hobbies are one thing, transporting potentially invasive species becomes another.
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.
And the things locals do to collect pretty fish are heinous beyond their comprehension. That $50 tropical fish could be one of a hundred collected on a reef that is now dead due to use of cyanide to stun it for easier collection.
Street drugs are getting weirder and weirder
Let’s snort some ant
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!
But you won't get Kenyan harvester ants...
What if you're in Kenya?
Probably won't sell the queens for much money there, since anybody can collect 'em literally with breadcrumbs.
Is that way these guys did?
Rich people aren’t very good with money.