The chocolates, potato chips and other colorful snacks that arrived as cargo at Los Angeles International Airport from Japan last month looked tempting.
The shipment, though, wasn’t destined to hit store shelves. Agriculture specialists with U.S. Customs and Border Protection discovered 37 giant live beetles hidden inside snack bags and containers, and agency officials said this week that the insects had most likely been intended for exotic insect collections.
They said that the beetles were worth about $1,500. The illegally smuggled insects included scarab beetles, stag beetles and darkling beetles, the agency said.
These bugs are four to six inches long, and some collectors enjoy seeing them fight against each other with their hornlike appendages during mating season, according to Jaime Ruiz, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
It’s illegal to import most live insects — including spiders and scorpions — into the United States without a permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service. The U.S. Department of Agriculture also requires permission to bring in some live invertebrates, like worms and snails.
In addition, there are great risks to the environment and agriculture when an insect is introduced to a place where it doesn’t naturally belong, experts said, pointing to the accidental introduction five years ago of “murder hornets” from East Asia to Washington State.
“You might be moving more than you think,” said Lynn Kimsey, an entomologist and former director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California, Davis. “These beetles aren’t going to be a problem, but there might be other things with them that would cause problems.”
At Los Angeles International Airport last month, the agriculture specialists noticed in X-rays that there appeared to be a second package inside a few of the snack bags and containers in a shipment from Japan, he said.
“Once you pull it out, you pick it up, and it doesn’t feel like a crunchy bag of chips or cookies, then you’re going to have to do a more thorough exam to see,” Mr. Ramirez said.
That’s when they found the live beetles inside. They removed the insects and kept them for the Department of Agriculture to pick up.
“We safeguard the beetles to make sure that none of them are trying to escape,” Mr. Ramirez said, “because there have been times where they’re in Styrofoam containers and they chew their way out.”
Smuggling illegal goods and falsely labeling packages are federal crimes. Sentences can carry a maximum of 25 years in prison, large fines and forfeiture of the goods.
While there have been no charges in this case, if investigators discover a pattern, federal smuggling charges would be considered. In this case, the importer is likely to receive a warning letter.
Despite potential risks to the environment, the illegal pet trade is flourishing. Customs and Border Protection intercepted 1,151 shipments of live insects from 2000 through 2024, and they intercepted 432 in 2024 alone, federal data shows. Each shipment probably contained dozens of insects, customs officials said.
“There’s a huge market for stuff like that,” Dr. Kimsey said. “I know it seems really weird, but there are people who have these as pets. They’re willing to pay a lot of money for the really showy things. They’re big, they’re exotic, and no one else has one.”
The beetle trade is mostly a black market. “The average person probably wouldn’t want to have anything to do with it,” she said.
But, globally, the exotic pet trade is a multibillion-dollar industry, and the trade in wildlife is worth between $30 and $43 billion annually, according to a 2022 report by the Animal Legal and Historical Center at Michigan State University’s Law School. The author of the report, Asia Siev, said that about $23 billion of that share is legal.
The customs agency seized an average of over 200 agricultural pests daily in 2023, data shows.
Agents can’t inspect every package, but their historical data gives them a framework of what to look for when it comes to suspicious packages. Packages from many Asian countries are a high risk for plant and animal pathogens, as well as for insects, said Beison Ramirez, the agriculture section chief for the customs bureau in Los Angeles.
As for those beetles that made the long journey from Japan, they will be rerouted to local zoos that have permits for them, Mr. Ruiz said.
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