Move over cats and dogs. There’s a new hot favorite pet in town: ants.

More and more people are raising pet ants around the world. They are small, low-maintenance and display complex behaviors that fascinate humans. But this fascination is leading to a bigger issue: an underground global trade of ants. Wild ants are now popping up in places where they are not supposed to. This trade could have serious environmental and financial repercussions, and is also making pet ants very expensive.

In the latest episode of Mongabay Explains, we look at why people are obsessed with pet ants and why these insects are costing a fortune.

By Abhishyant Kidangoor

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

This one ant can cost up to $220. Meet the giant African harvester Ant Queen. She’s kind of like a rock star in the pet ant community. Yup, that’s a thing.

Turns out, people love keeping ants. And buying them can be as easy as clicking a button. But this fascination is fuelling a lucrative illegal global trade. Kenya has nabbed four ant gang smugglers.

Pleaded guilty to trafficking ants. Found in possession of over 5,000 ant queens destined for the international market. As a wildlife reporter, I wanted to dig more into this murky underworld to find out why exactly are ants getting so expensive? To be fair, ants make fascinating pets.

You can watch them doing these really sophisticated behaviours in real time. They farm, build complex colonies, and fight intense battles. Plus, there are 20 quadrillion of them on the planet. Which means…

There is just pretty much every possible combination of behaviours under the sun. That’s not all. Ants are also… The most independent and autonomous pets you can get.

Don’t need grooming. They don’t need walking. Silent. Don’t require a lot of space.

Clearly, demand is high. And not just for our harvester ant. These species are getting lots of attention too. It’s hard to tell what the global ant trade is worth.

But this might help. According to this study, these many ant colonies were sold on only one Chinese e-commerce site in six months in 2021. Sergio here did some math on those numbers and found that… The top five species amounted to about $2.5 million per year.

Just in one platform, just five species in one country. That’s only a very, very small percentage of the global ant trade because… A lot of it is happening secretively.

And it is not being recorded, not being monitored, definitely not being regulated. Which is a problem. Wild ants are now popping up all over the world, far from their native ecosystems. The giant African harvester ant, for example, is found only in East Africa, but is now being exported far, far away.

Transporting ants out of their native country is super easy. They are small, portable, and can’t be detected by X-ray machines. They’re also not part of this agreement that regulates the global trade of more than 40,000 species. So, while exporting these ants is illegal in Kenya…

Once they cross the border, that becomes a grey area. That just enables the trade… which actually has massive environmental and financial repercussions. For instance, these harvester ants play a super important role in the African savannah.

They eat seeds, helping disperse them, while their digging and underground movements aerate the soil. They’re also a big source of food for many animals. So, removing them… can have cascading effects throughout food webs and environments. On the other hand, bringing ants into non-native environments could… disrupt the native communities and that sort of tapestry of species that are woven together.

I mean, this species from Asia has killed millions of native red crabs in Australia. While these ants from South America have caused widespread environmental damage in Hawaii. It’s clear that keeping a pet ant has huge implications. So, scientists are now pushing for stricter regulations around the ant trade.

These animals already have protections. So, why not ants? In the meantime, if you’re an ant lover, don’t despair. It is possible to keep ants legally and responsibly.

For starters… Never buy ants online. Instead, consider collecting and raising ants from your vicinity. Because while the trade of exotic ants keeps raking in more money, the cost of doing so is much, much higher.

What we really need here is a hero for ants. Maybe a superhero, perhaps. An ant-man, if you will. These are your greatest allies.

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Previously Published on news.mongabay with Creative Commons Attribution

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