Inspectors busted more than two dozen New Yorkers last year for harboring, selling or displaying a veritable Noah’s Ark of illegal wildlife, including stingrays, scorpions, snakes and a sloth, according to Health Department records.
The most outrageous menagerie belonged to a Long Island man who brought a king snake, lemur, hedgehog, marmoset, sloth, and a coati (a raccoon-type critter) to a children’s party on the Upper East Side, city records show.
City inspectors also found:
* Six stingrays in a Queens pet shop, two in a Lower East Side store and a foot-long blue-spot stingray on Staten Island.
* A black scorpion, tarantula and a white-faced capuchin monkey in East Flatbush, Brooklyn.
* A 7-foot-long boa constrictor in Jackson Heights, Queens, inside a “makeshift glass case.” “Respondent refused to surrender above mentioned snake to the Department of Health at the time of inspection,” the violation reads.
* A Washington Heights shop selling 10 piranhas.
The city prohibits ownership of 24 creature categories, including muskrats, jackals, seals, venomous snakes, spiders and insects, monkeys, and hyrax — which looks like a rodent but is related to an elephant.
Boas edged out pythons for the most common creature contraband, city data shows.
Fines for illegal animals are $500 each.