this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
208 points (97.7% liked)
Not The Onion
16145 readers
1690 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.