It’s hard to keep track of all the ways that the United States has changed since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January. The nation’s foreign aid programs have been destroyed, chaotic tariff policies have upended global trade, and press freedom has been repeatedly attacked. But there are also innumerable smaller shifts taking place and incrementally warping day-to-day life. One involves some of the country’s tiniest inhabitants: ants.
Sources tell WIRED that ant smugglers in the US have been emboldened by widespread government staffing cuts spearheaded by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. The United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which operates a program to stop the smuggling of invertebrate pests, was hit especially hard. The agency later rehired some of the people let go, but a number of the country’s best entomologists left for good.
Inside the world of illicit wildlife trafficking, there’s a growing assumption that nobody in government is paying attention. “The illegal market rapidly has become much more aggressive because of the lack of enforcement,” says Armando Rosario-Lebrón, who spoke to WIRED in his personal capacity, but also previously cochaired the Federal Interagency Committee on Invasive Terrestrial Animals and Pathogens before leaving the government earlier this year.
In a particularly turbulent moment in the United States, a rise in this kind of extremely niche and relatively harmless type of criminal activity could get lost. But if even a small percentage of the nonnative species of ants sold illegally get loose, it could have environmental, economic, and public health impacts. The US has already seen a variety of problems caused by invasive ants entering the country in previous decades, like the tawny crazy ant in Florida, which can form supercolonies inside homes that eat away electrical equipment. “The invasiveness potential is off the charts,” Rosario-Lebrón says. “It's just ridiculous.”
USDA spokesperson Heather Curlett said in a statement that the agency’s enforcement of federal plant pest regulations “has not changed or diminished.”
Antkeeping communities are usually pretty wholesome, driven by enthusiasts who have a keen, genuine interest in citizen science. In recent years, several prominent antkeeping creators have helped spike interest in the hobby. Most of the people involved have no criminal inclinations and many are very young. Rosario-Lebrón describes the typical ant vendor’s customer base as “children under 17.” They might not necessarily know that the USDA requires ant vendors to apply for permits to sell between states, so some buyers of illegal ants are doing so unintentionally. “The parents don't know it's illegal. The kids don't know it's illegal,” says Rosario-Lebrón.
The sellers, however, often do. WIRED spoke with several people involved in the black market ant trade, who asked to remain anonymous so they could speak freely about their knowledge of potentially illicit behavior. Some say they’ve witnessed a change in the smuggling ecosystem since the Trump administration began making steep cuts to the federal government, including the USDA. “It’s getting out of hand,” one seller says. “They realize the US market is a gold mine.”
These sellers do brisk business online. On mainstream platforms like Ebay, they often upcharge novice antkeepers, the same trafficker tells WIRED; more sophisticated hobbyists buy and sell on private Discord servers. “Everyone on Discord has their respect towards each other about prices,” the trafficker says. They estimate an order that might go for roughly $350 on Discord could go for like $1,000 on eBay.
Ebay’s current policy on live animal sales prohibits the selling of ants, but according to tests performed by WIRED, it’s easy to find a wide variety of species for sale on the platform, from common sights throughout the US like black carpenter ants, to more exotic fare like the slender twig ant, a stinging variety native to Mexico.(Ebay did not respond to requests for comment.)
In recent months, several sellers have witnessed black market players become more ruthlessly competitive as they race to make the most money, attempting to sabotage rivals by tipping off law enforcement and even threatening them with violence. “I’ve seen two guys threaten to shoot each other online,” says another seller, who is currently involved in a Discord server devoted to unregulated buying and selling. “Over a children’s hobby!”
Several smugglers stressed that most black market sellers have a genuine love for antkeeping and try to handle their insects responsibly. But recently, they say, newer players have started to behave in a more reckless manner amid what they perceive as a lax regulatory environment with less oversight.
In an effort to maximize profits, some dealers collect and sell large volumes of specimens. These vendors often procure their wares from the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, a hot spot for ant diversity that attracts collectors looking for species like leafcutter and honeypot ants, two types that tend to sell well because they have unique properties. “It’s going to start hurting the population,” the first seller told WIRED. “You can’t just take thousands of queens without causing issues.”
Insect experts have watched the upheaval at the USDA and other federal agencies tasked with controlling pests with alarm. “There's been a lot of cutting of the inspectors as part of the quote-unquote ‘efficiency’ moves from the government recently,” says Chris Stelzig, executive director of the Entomological Society of America. “A reduced infrastructure to detect invasive species can be problematic.”
Even prior to the recent cuts, some experts say there were problems with how the US enforced laws on insect trafficking across state lines. Carlos Blanco, an entomologist who recently retired from his role at the USDA and who spoke to WIRED in his personal capacity, says that bureaucratic disorganization has plagued the department for years. Blanco describes the rise of illicit ant sales as “a headache we really tried to control,” but it was difficult to coordinate effectively between agencies. “Some of these illegal vendors would laugh in our faces.”
Before leaving the government during the layoffs this year, Rosario-Lebrón says he had to lobby hard for any attention to be paid to the ant smuggling issue, noting that he pushed to “make a legal route so that we could have the kids find legal queens to buy online, and we started working really hard to permit people.” Queen ants, the reproductive females that lay all the eggs, are necessary for any colony’s survival but are especially risky to transport, as letting an invasive queen loose in a new area means that it could establish a colony and displace native ants.
“We work to address all instances of noncompliance both from permit holders who fail to follow the terms and conditions of their permits and those who move plant pests without obtaining the proper permits,” says Curlett, the USDA spokesperson. “We have the same number of entomology staff within the pest permitting unit as we did before.”
But within the illicit ant-selling community, people say that the current permitting system has gotten harder to navigate and is contributing to the rise in illegal sales. One former black market ant seller says the main problem isn’t that ant smuggling has radically changed since the cuts—“enforcement was always virtually nonexistent,” they explain—but rather that people who would ordinarily try to do things legally are now being discouraged from seeking out permits.
“Smuggling ants hasn't gotten easier from the cuts to federal services, trading ants across state borders legally has gotten harder,” they said. What has been affected: the “permit process and trying to do things legally.”
Ant smuggling is surprisingly big business around the world. This spring, two Belgian teenagers were apprehended in Kenya after attempting to smuggle 5,000 ants out of the country in test tubes in order to sell them abroad; they later pled guilty to “wildlife piracy.”
One of the US-based smugglers who spoke to WIRED says that they are able to order ants from Thailand, Vietnam, China, and parts of Europe on a regular basis without issue. Customs and Border Protection, which works with APHIS to monitor pests that enter the United States at international points of entry, “has not seen any significant change in interceptions of ants this year” according to spokesperson Michael Mascari.
