Posted on 05/07/2025 12:11:12 PM PDT by BenLurkin
A Kenyan court has sentenced four men to one year in prison or pay a fine of $7,700 (£5,800) for trying to smuggle thousands of live queen ants out of the country.
They had pleaded guilty to the charges, with the Belgians telling the court that they were collecting the highly sought-after ants as a hobby and didn't think it was illegal.
But delivering the sentence on Wednesday, the judge said the particular species of ants collected was valuable and they had thousands of them — not just a few.
The contraband included giant African harvester ants, which are valued by some UK dealers at up to £170 ($220) each.
Belgian nationals Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, both 19, Vietnamese national Duh Hung Nguyen and Kenyan Dennis Ng'ang'a, were handed similar terms after the magistrate considered their mitigation arguments.
The Belgians were found with 5,000 ants while the other two were found with more than 300 ants in their apartments.
The ants were packed in more than 2,000 test tubes filled with cotton wool to help them survive for months, authorities said.
The Belgian teens had entered Kenya on a tourist visa and were staying in Naivasha, a town popular with tourists for its animal parks and lakes.
The court said Ng'ang'a, 26, acted as a "broker" due to his knowledge of the ants that are found in his rural home.
David, an ant enthusiast with 10 colonies of ants at home in Belgium, belongs to a Facebook group called "Ant Gang", the court heard.
The Belgian teen, who first visited Kenya five years ago, said he had bought 2,500 queen ants for $200 when he was arrested looking for more.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
No doubt we will have them as an invasive species here in the US soon.
Wigglers and small crayfish from the stream near my house, small minnows that I purchased or net-dipped from the river, earthworms dug up from the garden, guppies purchased from the pet shop, and, in the winter, when Morty was sort of halfway hibernating, I would feed him fish pellets. When I’d clean his fishtank, he would migrate to the bathtub ...
Then they would be GI-ants....
Get it..
Aaaahahahaha
HA! Very good.
The answer was staring me in the face!
That’s amazing! How big did he grow? Did you let him go or did he die an old mudpuppy in captivity?
Insects collected in that window well / hole in the back yard, so the turtle
was well fed without any effort.
It would burrow down into the ground in the winter to get shelter from
the cold and snow. Then when the weather warmed up, there he was
‘topside’ again. It was almost amazing.
You know that box turtles can live up to 50 years?
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