Carla Subirana

speaker

99 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Sep

Carla Subirana’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Working through it: the AI jobs boom dawns · 10 Sep 2026 podcast

There are licensed shops where you can buy many species of ants.

But the problem is that demand for rare species of ants, like the ones you can find in Kenya, is starting to outstrip the legal supply.

And African harvester ants, which are the ones that were found in the trafficking case, they are very sought after because they're very big.

They're very strikingly colored.

They're very clever.

So they display like complex social behaviors.

One of the scientists I spoke to described them as the tigers of the ant world.

And so for collectors, that makes them very desirable.

Basically, the ants have very strict hierarchies, but sometimes battles emerge within the hierarchies.

These are some of the videos in the Ants Canada profile.

And also ants are very smart and sometimes they try to, for example, escape the colony and they create really elaborate plans.

They're not going to go extinct.

But the problem is that traffickers are targeting such huge amount of queens that they could still damage ecosystems.

Queens are the only member of the colony that can reproduce.

And so basically, if you take her away, you can wipe out the whole colony and thousands of workers that she would have eventually produced.

So if you start removing them in large numbers, there's a risk that you will basically disrupt the ecosystems of the savannas.

Well, the answers are so small and so hard to catch that I think that even if you stepped up inspections at airports, it would be really hard to solve this.

So I think that people need to understand that this actually matters a lot for Africa's savannas.

And that means educating collectors about where their ants are coming from and what the trade is doing to their ecosystems.

I think I'm OK for now.

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