By Olivier Acuña Barba •
Published: 24 Apr 2025 • 16:58
• 2 minutes read
Oecophylla longinoda is an ant tree species found in the tropical forests of Africa | Photo: Achoelator / Shutterstock
Two young men were arrested in Kenya with approximately 5,000 queen ants, valued at more than €8,000, and are being charged with trafficking the highly valued insects. News reports claim those ants would be worth nearly €1 million in Europe.
Belgian citizens David Lornoy and Seppe Lodewijckx, both 19 years old, were found on April 5th in a guest home in the western Kenyan town of Naivasha with the insects. They were charged 10 days later with violating wildlife conservation laws.
They confessed to illegal possession of ants, but claim they did not know that it was unlawful. However, local authorities say they are sure the insects were intended for European and Asian markets.
A Kenyan magistrate’s court said it expects the two Belgian teenagers to be sentenced in two weeks, potentially on May 7th, once they have had time to review the environmental impact and psychological reports filed with the court.
The teens told Judge Njeri Thuku, sitting at the court in Kenya’s main airport, that they had no idea keeping the ants was illegal and were just having fun.
‘We are not criminals’
“We are not criminals, we are 18 years old, we are naive, and I just want to go home to start my life,” Lornoy said during a first trial session last week..
The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) had said the case represented “a shift in trafficking trends — from iconic large mammals to lesser-known yet ecologically critical species.” The country has in the past dealt with the trafficking of body parts of larger wild animals, including elephants, rhinos, and pangolins.
But it is similar to smuggling cocaine
“It’s like cocaine,” Dino Martins, director of the Turkana Basin Institute and one of Kenya’s leading insect experts, told Reuters. “The price of cocaine in Colombia versus getting a kilogram in the European market is such a big value addition, that’s why people do it.”
The two Belgian teens entered the country on a tourist visa to enjoy Naivasha, a town popular among tourists for its animal parks and lakes.
David and Seppe’s lawyer, Halima Nyakinyua Magairo, is arguing that her clients did not know what they were doing was illegal. She also said she expected the Belgian embassy in Kenya to “support them more in this judicial process.”
Others caught smuggling 400 more ants
In a separate case, Kenyan Dennis Ng’ang’a and Vietnamese Duh Hung Nguyen were charged after they were found in possession of 400 ants in their apartment in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. They also confessed to possessing the ants illegally.
KWS stated that these two suspects are also involved in trafficking the ants to markets in Europe and Asia, where people purchase them as pets and to observe their colonies.
The four ant trafficking suspects had ant species, such as the messor cephalotes, a distinctive, large, and red-coloured harvester ant native to East Africa.
Kenyan prosecutors valued both seizures at about 1.2 million Kenyan shillings ($9,300). However, Reuters estimated that, depending on the number and variety of each species found, the haul would have been worth about one million euros if it had reached European shores.
