Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 29
ZO OLOGY
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GORONGOSA SP ECIAL
The stunned animals roll up and become as compact
as a medicine ball, making them easy to scoop up and
shove in a sack.
Currently, Angela, a wildlife veterinarian,
is caring for two pangolins—a baby of only a
few months who was rescued from traffickers
by Gorongosa’s rangers, and an adult, brought
to the center by locals living near the park
who were concerned that it, too, might end
up ensnared in the trade. The baby—a male
who Angela calls Tembo—arrived in September
2022 hungry and traumatized. Angela kept him
on a diet of milk for three months to help him
gain weight before he graduated to ants, which
he siphons up at a rate of nearly half a pound a
day. She forecasts that in the next few months
he might be ready to join the other 98 pangolins Gorongosa has rescued since her center
started work in 2018.
The addition of Tembo to that number will
be significant. So pervasive is the poaching that
the world’s population of pangolins is thought
to have dropped by as much as 80 percent
over the past two decades alone, the Swissbased International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN) has warned.
As rare a find as pangolins are, they’re
unmissable. Adult pangolins can be as big as
racoons and weigh as much as 40 pounds, but
they bear a striking resemblance to an artichoke with legs. Their heads and bodies are
riveted with an armor of thorny scales, making
them look reptilian. Despite their otherworldly
appearance, their scales have a characteristic
familiar to every human—they’re made of keratin, the same protein that makes up our fingernails and hair.
IN ZOOLOGICAL LITERATURE , pangolins are
loosely referred to as scaley anteaters because
of that armor and their diet, but they aren’t
related to true anteaters. Rather, they belong
to a group all their own—one of the strangest
orders of mammals—the Pholidota, which contains only eight living species.
Four of these are found across much of
Asia, in countries ranging from India to China,
and farther to Malaysia and the Philippines.
The other four—including the African Ground
Pangolin—are native to sub-Saharan countries
stretching from Sudan to South Africa. All of
them are at risk of extinction, the IUCN says.
The grandest international effort taken against
the illegal trade in pangolins came in 2016,
when 183 nations signed the Convention on
the International Trade in Endangered Species,
known as CITES, which placed all eight species
of pangolin in the document’s Appendix I, giving them the strictest protections.
Similar to carnivores by descent and armadillos by convergent evolution, pangolins are
most closely related to bears and—yes—cats.
But they are almost monastic when compared
to those more outgoing cousins. The male and
female pangolin come together only to mate,
with females capable of giving birth to one baby
about every two years. Angela says the single
offspring then spend about four months riding
on their mother’s tail as they get the hang of
hunting. Then they separate and set off for a
solitary life all their own, sometimes living as
long as 20 years.
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