Here’s a headline I never thought I’d read.
Ryan Reynolds “but why” GIF.
To sell. Foreign ant queens can be worth like 200$ a pop easy.
Ryan Reynolds “but why” GIF.
These rare ants are in high demand for culinary and ornamental use abroad
Can I get my shark fin soup with rare queen ant garnish?
So I don’t know about culinary but I’m guessing it’s mostly for ant farms.
To annoy neighbors? What do they do with they ants
Edit: looks like just as a hobby
I was obsessed with a few YouTube channels for a while, mainly antscanada. It looks like a fun hobby tbh, I almost got myself a farm.
…but why?
It is believed that the intended destinations were the exotic pet markets in Europe and Asia.
That looks like the final boss of Japanese capsule vending machines.
Is there some kind of breeding technique to cultivating a large quantity of queens? Or is this just pure brute force poking at a bunch of hives/nests/mounds?
Nobody else look at the picture and wonder if they boofed the ant capsules.
Feels like it would be easier to smuggle a handfull then start farming them
Farming non-native species can be incredibly difficult.
Harder than digging and collecting then smuggling 2000 ant queens?
If you’re using Kenyan labor, I imagine that the collecting is probably pretty inexpensive. Wages in Kenya probably aren’t going to be very high.
searches
https://humancapital.worldbank.org/en/economy/KEN
According to that, 70.1% of the population makes less than $3.65/day (2021 numbers). If the comment in this thread about a queen selling for $200 is accurate, you can probably afford to put a lot of human labor into collecting.
would be really funny if the guy put out a bounty of like 50 bucks for a queen and word got around so fast he ended up with too many and he might as well try to sell them back home
We get Chinese smugglers poaching tortoises and hermit crabs here in Okinawa. So annoying.
I am trying to understand who buys them and why ?
Rich people and collecting weird stuff
It is believed that the intended destinations were the exotic pet markets in Europe and Asia.
It’s all just a big misunderstanding, he was worried that the little bag of peanuts would leave him unsatisfied and hungry on the flight home.
See, that’s actually the illegal part.
