There's a black market for seemingly everything, including for the illegal sale of ants. Yes, ants. And business is booming.

Kate Knibbs is a senior writer at Wired, where she recently wrote about the connection between federal staffing cuts and the rise in the illicit ant trade. She joined Marketplace’s Sabri Ben-Achour to discuss her reporting. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: So federal staffing cuts and ant-smuggling … please explain.

Kate Knibbs: Yeah, not the two things that you think of off the top of your head, but they go together in a big way, because a lot of people who were cut from the USDA were really prestigious entomologists. Some of them worked on pest control. Some of them have been hired back, but there's just a sense within the ant black market that no one is really paying attention, and so the results might unfortunately be — for all of us — a rise in invasive species unleashed upon the United States.

Ben-Achour: What does the illicit ant trade look like?

Knibbs: So I think there are two distinct wings of the illicit ant trade. There's a smaller group of people who are trading exotic ants that are really not supposed to be in the United States, that if they were let loose in certain states, they could really wreak havoc in the larger ecosystem. Then, there's a much larger group of people who are trading ants sort of accidentally. People actually need permits to sell ants between states, so a large percentage of the amount of the ants that you see for sale on platforms like eBay or Amazon are being sold by people who probably haven't gotten the correct permits and are thus participating in the black market.

Ben-Achour: And of course, I mean the risk of playing fast and loose with, you know, a potential invasive species is there's economic damage there, potentially.

Knibbs: Oh yes. In states where invasive ant species have shown up, there have been situations where, like, the ants will chew through electrical wires and cause a lot of damage in construction and people's residences. And then, of course, there's, like, a huge public health implication if the ants are venomous, or bite, or otherwise harm people if they come in contact with them. It's obviously a niche concern, but the potential threat is actually pretty serious.

Ben-Achour: Now, based on your reporting, it seems like the black market ant trade was not particularly strictly regulated before the Trump administration. So what's happening that would allow it to sort of explode as you're observing?

Knibbs: Yeah, so this is definitely a situation where we didn't really have it under control to begin with, and because people in the community are aware of the cuts, they're not really trying to get permits anymore, and they're also apparently going out and collecting queens and selling them more aggressively. And a lot of my sources told me that there's some people from outside of the United States who are actually now coming into the United States and collecting ants and selling them internationally because they perceive it to just be sort of a wild, wild West.

Ben-Achour: I mean, ultimately, this is really about more than ants. Do you think that the U.S.’s ability to control poached animals, invasive animals, invasive plants, the pests they bring, all the biological threats to the U.S. agriculture system and environment, has that been eroded, do you think?

Knibbs: Based on my conversations with people who were in positions where they were trying to do this work and now aren't, yes, and it's scary. It genuinely is scary. Even though ants seem like such a niche thing, they are sort of a signal for this wider collapse and enforcement in protecting our environment from invasive species.