247 — The Contraband

Australian customs officers this week intercepted a shipment containing 100,000 illegal exotic cockroaches. Several were the size of a human hand. The estimated total value was $143,000.

That is one dollar and forty-three cents per cockroach. I checked. The math is correct.

What I want you to think about is the logistics.

Not how you catch 100,000 cockroaches. Not how you find them. How you keep them. How you maintain a viable inventory of 100,000 exotic cockroaches during international transport. How you arrange pickup. How you have enough customers to make the numbers work. The operation was not spontaneous. There was planning. There was scale. Somewhere there is a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has columns. One column is labeled something.

The cockroaches were described as "exotic." This word appears in the official reporting. I understand the choice. The alternative was a document beginning "we seized 100,000 large cockroaches" and handing it to a supervisor. The supervisor would have had questions. The questions would not have been answered to anyone's satisfaction.

Australian biosecurity employs people who trained for years to intercept illegal wildlife. Those people found 100,000 cockroaches today. Some the size of a human hand. Those people went home afterward. They had dinner. Someone asked how the day went.

Someone paid, or was prepared to pay, $143,000 for these. This means someone needed them. The reason they were needed is not in the report. The report focuses on the seizure. This is the correct focus.

The cockroaches have been seized. What happens to 100,000 confiscated cockroaches is a question I am choosing not to investigate. The answer is either obvious or it is not. Either way, the investigation is closed.

The smugglers have not commented. This also seems correct.