Pangolins Are the Most Trafficked Mammal on Earth! Most People Have Never Heard of Them.

There are eight species of pangolin. Four live in Africa. Four live in Asia. All eight are threatened with extinction. The Chinese pangolin, Manis pentadactyla, is Critically Endangered. The Sunda pangolin, Manis javanica, is Critically Endangered. The Philippine pangolin, Manis culionensis, is Critically Endangered. The Indian pangolin, Manis crassicaudata, is Endangered. The four African species are Vulnerable.

Every year, tens of thousands of pangolins are seized by law enforcement in trafficking operations across Asia and Africa. These seizures represent a fraction of the actual trade. Researcher Daniel Challender at the University of Oxford has studied pangolin trafficking networks in detail, estimating that over one million pangolins were trafficked in the decade between 2000 and 2013, making pangolins the most heavily trafficked wild mammal on Earth by volume.

The demand is driven primarily by traditional Chinese medicine markets, where pangolin scales are used as a treatment for various conditions despite no scientific evidence of pharmacological effect, and by demand for pangolin meat as a luxury food in parts of China and Vietnam. The scales are made of keratin, the same protein as human fingernails. Eating them has no more medical effect than eating fingernails.

The Animal Itself

The pangolin is covered in overlapping scales of keratin that cover its entire body except for its face, inner legs, and belly. When threatened, it rolls into a tight ball, protecting its vulnerable underside with its armored exterior. The scales are hard enough to resist the bites of lions and leopards. They are not hard enough to resist a human with a bag.

Maria Boafo at the University of Ghana has studied African pangolin ecology and behavior, finding that pangolins are solitary, nocturnal, and extremely difficult to study in the wild. They have small home ranges, move slowly, and spend most of their time in burrows or tree hollows. Their primary food is ants and termites, which they excavate with powerful front claws and collect with a tongue that can extend longer than their entire body length, coated in sticky saliva.

The tongue is anchored not in the throat but in the chest cavity, attached to the sternum, because it is too long to fit in the head. A pangolin’s tongue, fully extended, can reach 40 centimeters in a medium-sized individual. Pangolins have no teeth. They swallow small stones that sit in their muscular stomach and grind the insects they consume, in the same way that birds use gizzard stones. The entire digestive system is adapted for a diet of social insects, and pangolins consume tens of millions of ants and termites per year, making them significant regulators of insect populations in the ecosystems they inhabit.

The Captivity Problem

Pangolins are extraordinarily difficult to keep in captivity. They are highly stressed by confinement, prone to respiratory infections, and refuse to eat anything other than live ants and termites in many cases. Carly Waterman at the Zoological Society of London has documented the challenges of pangolin captive husbandry, finding that mortality rates in captivity are high and that successful long-term captive management requires conditions that are difficult and expensive to replicate.

This captive fragility means that pangolins cannot be managed through captive breeding programs in the way that some other threatened species have been. Conservation depends almost entirely on protecting wild populations and reducing demand for pangolin products.

The animal that rolls into a ball when threatened, that has a tongue anchored in its chest, that eats tens of millions of insects per year and has been doing so for 80 million years, is being emptied from the forests of Asia and Africa for scales that do nothing. The most trafficked mammal on Earth is one that most people in the countries consuming it could not identify from a photograph.