Pangolin Take 5 - World Pangolin Day

Hi, I'm Carrie and this is Pangolin Take 5. There are eight species of pangolins spread throughout Asia and Africa. Brookfield Zoo is currently home to white-bellied pangolins which are from West Africa. These unique mammals have a cone-shaped head, a body that's covered in sharp scales made of keratin, and a long muscular tail. White-bellied pangolins are arboreal, meaning that they spend their time in trees. They use their prehensile tails to grasp onto branches for balance while navigating through the trees. Unfortunately, pangolins are the most trafficked animal in the world due to the use of their scales in traditional medicine in Africa and Asia and the use of their meat as a delicacy. When threatened, pangolins curl up into a ball so only their hard, scaly backs are exposed. While this is great defense against predators, it leaves them vulnerable to human poachers. Pangolins have long, sticky tongues that they use to eat ants and termites. One adult pangolin can eat up to 20,000 ants or termites in a day. That's 7.3 million ants and termites in a year. Can you imagine what the world would look like without pangolins? Pangolins give birth to one offspring at a time. The baby rides on its mom's tail until it's big enough to get around on its own. By six months of age, the baby is independent and can start venturing away from its mother. In 2016, the Chicago Zoological Society, along with six other zoological institutions and one non-profit organization formed the Pangolin Consortium. The consortium is working to establish a sustainable population of white-bellied tree pangolins under professional care to aid in better understanding their behavior and physiology and to support field conservation efforts. There are currently 17 active research projects underway through the collaborative efforts of the consortium, with more added every day. Project topics include nutrition, reproduction, anatomy, health assessments, and more. The consortium is also supporting research of wild populations through a grant program and global information sharing. Through these collaborative efforts, we have learned more about white-bellied pangolins in the last four years than we have been able to achieve in the last 30 years of previous study. To learn more about pangolin and to see these incredible animals in person, be sure to visit Habitat Africa the Forest here at Brookfield Zoo.