A man was arrested with more than 2,200 live garden ants in his luggage at Nairobi’s main airport \u200bthis week amid a rise in cases of smuggling \u200cof the insects in Kenya.<\/p>\n
Chinese national Zhang Kequn, 27, was arrested at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on Tuesday while he was trying to \u200bleave the country, court filings seen by Reuters on \u200bThursday showed. Immigration officials flagged a “stop order” on \u2060Zhang’s passport after he evaded arrest in Kenya last year.<\/p>\n
Ant \u200baficionados\u00a0pay large sums\u00a0to maintain colonies in large transparent vessels known \u200bas formicariums, which offer a literal window into the species’ complex social structures and behaviours.<\/p>\n
Last year\u00a0four men\u00a0were fined $7,700 each for trying to traffic \u200bthousands of ants valuable to Kenya’s ecosystem in a \u200bcase that experts said signalled a shift in biopiracy from trophies like elephant \u200civory \u2060to lesser-known species.<\/p>\n
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”.<\/p>\n
They said Zhang had \u200bbeen in Kenya \u200bfor two weeks \u2060and had mentioned three accomplices who supplied him with the ants.<\/p>\n
The Kenya Wildlife Service told \u200bthe court that it needed more time to \u200bcomplete \u2060investigations, including examining an iPhone and a MacBook recovered from Zhang.<\/p>\n
The wildlife service said a similar consignment of ants had been seized \u2060in \u200bBangkok on Tuesday that originated from \u200bKenya, indicating the existence of a widespread and organised ant-smuggling network.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A man was arrested with more than 2,200 live garden ants in his luggage at Nairobi’s main airport \u200bthis week amid a rise in cases of smuggling \u200cof the insects in Kenya. Chinese national Zhang Kequn, 27, was arrested at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on Tuesday while he was trying to \u200bleave the country, court […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20162,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":5,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"format":"standard","override":[{"template":"1","parallax":"1","fullscreen":"1","layout":"right-sidebar","sidebar":"default-sidebar","second_sidebar":"default-sidebar","sticky_sidebar":"1","share_position":"top","share_float_style":"share-monocrhome","show_featured":"1","show_post_meta":"1","show_post_author_image":"1","show_post_date":"1","post_date_format":"default","post_date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","show_post_reading_time":"0","post_reading_time_wpm":"300","post_calculate_word_method":"str_word_count","show_zoom_button":"0","zoom_button_out_step":"2","zoom_button_in_step":"3","show_post_tag":"1","show_comment_section":"1","number_popup_post":"1","show_post_related":"1","show_inline_post_related":"1"}],"image_override":[{"single_post_thumbnail_size":"crop-500","single_post_gallery_size":"crop-500"}],"trending_post_position":"meta","trending_post_label":"Trending","sponsored_post_label":"Sponsored by","disable_ad":"0","source_name":"Reuters","subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":{"view_counter_number":"0","share_counter_number":"0","like_counter_number":"0","dislike_counter_number":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,2854,34],"tags":[111,4950],"class_list":["post-20161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-east-africa","category-health","category-society","tag-kenya","tag-kenya-wildlife-service"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20163,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20161\/revisions\/20163"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}