Gorongosa 2024-FULL-FINAL - Flipbook - Page 30
And it’s the lonely foraging and burrowing of the
African Ground Pangolin that Angela says makes them
so essential to the recovery of Gorongosa’s ecosystem.
Making quick work of ant and termite hills, pangolins
burrow after their prey with deft foreclaws and long,
slithering tongues. And where they sniff and nudge the
soil by night, nutrients can penetrate more deeply by
day, helping to replenish food stores for Gorongosa’s
other animals and encouraging rejuvenation of the
vegetation.
This appetite has other benefits. Angela says that
most adult pangolins can eat about a pound of their
quarry in their daily feeding, guarding against destructive termite and ant plagues.
But for all the waste they lay to their prey, pangolins
are almost entirely harmless to any other living creature. When this bashful animal is frightened, it curls up
into a tight ball, the scales offering its first—and, really,
only—line of defense.
Sadly, it’s that defense mechanism that Mercia says
makes them so susceptible to capture by traffickers. As
poachers drive pangolins into the open by setting fire to
their burrows or battering them out of trees with sticks
and clubs, the stunned animals roll up and become as
compact as a medicine ball, making them easy to scoop
up and shove in a sack.
Often, when poachers are interested only in the
scales, they drop the curled-up pangolins into pots of
water and boil them alive to make the scales easier to
pluck. From there, the scales make their way to Nigeria,
where smugglers bundle them with other wildlife contraband like elephant tusks and ship them off to Asia.
TO THE RESCUE Gorongosa rangers patrol the park,
dismantling snares and keeping tabs on GPS-tagged
pangolins. Here they release a pangolin rescued from
poachers.
