As the recent seizure of more than 5,000 endemic ants in Kenya reveals, ants have become part of a thriving global wildlife trade. Transnational traffickers are mopping up ants from the wild to sell them to hobbyists and collectors worldwide. In a recently published letter, conservationists are now calling for greater trade protections for all ant species under CITES, the global wildlife trade treaty.
Ants play an important ecological role as seed dispersers and soil engineers and are essential components of soil biodiversity, said Sérgio Henriques, a letter co-author from CCMAR, the Algarve Centre of Marine Sciences at the University of Algarve, Portugal. But they are being harvested “at an alarming rate for a global market that is operating almost entirely in the shadows and moved across the world,” he told Mongabay by email.
While the Kenyan seizure garnered international attention, Henriques said data show similar cases in Central Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, where traders target “visually striking” or “ecologically interesting” ant species. “Many of these are range-restricted endemics that are particularly vulnerable to disturbance by poaching,” he added.
Ants can also become invasive pests when introduced in areas outside their range. On Australia’s Christmas Island, for instance, yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes) from Asia have wiped out native red crabs (Gecarcoidea natalis). Meanwhile, little fire ants (Wasmannia auropunctata) from Central and South America cost a whopping $170 million in damages in Hawai`i annually.
“Any of these places that have invasive ant problems are spending bazillions,” Chris Shepherd, a letter co-author from the Center for Biological Diversity, told Mongabay in an interview. “If ant trade is becoming popular, we should be putting things in place right now to prevent these nightmares and to prevent these incredibly expensive messes to clean up.”
Currently, no ant species are listed on CITES Appendices, meaning none of them have any protections from international trade. Data on the scale, hotspots and destinations of ant trade are also patchy.
Henriques said that adding all ants to CITES Appendix II, which allows commercial international trade with permits, can help better monitor and manage ant trade. “Without regulation, the trade remains clandestine, unmonitored, unchecked, often moving across borders through informal online channels and mislabeled shipments,” he added.
However, listing a species on CITES Appendix I or II, which affords tighter international trade regulations, involves years-long bureaucratic processes and voting at CITES meetings. More immediately, Shepherd said, countries can add their ant species to Appendix III, which does not need parties’ consensus or votes. “Then there’s a mechanism in place, at least, to monitor what’s going on or prevent the illegal export of the ants.”
“Parties should be looking at [the ant trade] as a really serious issue,” Shepherd said. “It’s really creating a demand for what could be an ecological nightmare.”
Banner image: Leafcutter ants from South America are kept in zoos across the world. Image by Pjt56 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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