The Secret Life Of Pangolins

PALAWAN – IT’S 1AM AND MOST PEOPLE are safely in their beds. Instead I’m deep in the jungles of Palawan with an international team of researchers and a squad of Philippine Marines, searching for pangolins, the most illegally trafficked mammals on Earth.

- Gregg Yan

We’re pushing up a near-sheer slope of thorny rattan palms on a carpet of rotting orange leaves crawling with bugs. In the dark, I’m endlessly snagged and scratched. I’m so tired that a troop of Palawan bearded pigs could dance a polka in front of us and I’d never notice.

Earlier we saw a venomous pit viper, which our scout almost grabbed because it looked like a fat, green vine. We passed a tarantula pit, but didn’t provoke the owner. Then there are the hornets, tiny dive-bombers that congregate around headlamps, forcing us to stop and switch offuntil they buzz off. Suddenly our scout Joel, a native of the local

Tagbanua tribe, stiffens as his tracker dog Itiman barks, picking up a possible scent.

“We haven’t found a pangolin in six months,” he had confessed to us the day before.

But there are fresh pangolin claw marks on the trees around us. The three Marines behind me lock and load their M4s in case what Itiman has found isn’t a pangolin.

We slink forward, grinning in the dark. This could be it . . .

Pangolins, also called ‘scaly anteaters’ though they are not related to anteaters, get their name from the Malay word penggulung that describes their tendency to roll into a protective ball when threatened.

Their golden scales shield them from both predators and their ticklish prey. They can slurp down up to 20,000 ants or termites a night which they dig out of nests using backhoe-like claws and grab with a slithering sticky tongue. This diet is one reason they are often incredibly hard to keep in captivity.

Four species inhabit Africa: the giant ground pangolin, white-bellied pangolin, black-bellied pangolin and Temminck’s ground pangolin. Four more live in Asia: the Sunda pangolin, Chinese pangolin, Indian pangolin and Philippine pangolin (Manis culionensis), found only in Palawan and classified as Endangered by the IUCN.