Lehmann wants to “provide governments with rapid and accurate tools for habitat conservation, and improve wildlife crime forensics in general”, and hopes his research will bolster efforts against poaching and trafficking. “For three years now we have been detecting ivory poachers with sacks of pangolin scale.” “The demand from China and the enormous profit margins are attracting organised crime.” International syndicates smuggling ivory, minerals, gold and diamonds at the border with Cameroon have expanded the scope of their business, he says. “Gabon is seeing the commercial poaching of pangolins,” says White. But any benefits from the move have yet to filter down. There is no scientific evidence for the effectiveness of the medicine, so wildlife groups welcomed an announcement in June that pangolin was being removed from the official 2020 listing of ingredients approved for use in traditional Chinese medicine. Pangolin scales are a popular ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, used for anything from rheumatism, asthma and cancer to treating infertility in women and promoting lactation. Ghost was captured as part of research for the EU’s Ecofac6 programme, which started in the 1990s to safeguard biodiversity in the Congo basin. Popular for its meat, the pangolin has long been hunted for local consumption but Gabon’s minister for forests, oceans, environment and climates, Professor Lee White, argues that it is the demand in Asia that is of chief concern. Without this natural top-down control conservationists fear there would be a cascading impact on the environment, leaving the forest ecology seriously disrupted. As regulators of insect populations, pangolins are a key species in the rainforest: an individual pangolin consumes as many as 70 million ants and termites a year. With the four Asian species already hunted to near extinction, the African Wildlife Foundation estimates that around 2.7 million pangolins are trafficked from Africa’s rainforests each year.Īll eight pangolin species are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list, with three listed as critically endangered. Pangolins are thought to be the world’s most trafficked mammals. When attacked, it rolls into an armoured ball with scales raised: an effective defence against predators, but not against the snare traps of poachers. The only scaly mammal in the world, a pangolin’s body is covered with razor-sharp, overlapping keratin plates. “What we are doing here is pioneering work,” he says.Ī camera-trap in Lopé-Okanda national park captures a giant pangolin at night. His research is part of the EU’s Ecofac6 programme, a commitment that started in the 1990s to safeguard biodiversity in the Congo basin. “We know little about their basic ecology, their movements and population sizes, and our lack of knowledge hinders our efforts to protect them,” says Lehmann, a wildlife ecologist. The team – consisting of eco-guards, an indigenous tracker, a field biologist and a wildlife vet – hope that Ghost, who weighs 38kg and measures 1.72m from nose to tail, will give valuable insights in their fight against poaching.Ī nocturnal lifestyle and the fact that it feels most at home in a complex system of deep inaccessible burrows makes the giant ground pangolin – Smutsia gigantea – one of the least researched species in the animal kingdom. After a two-week chase through Lopé-Okanda national park, a mosaic of rainforest and savannah in central Gabon, David Lehmann and his Wildlife Capture Unit were celebrating – they had caught a giant pangolin nicknamed Ghost, the biggest on record.
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