His name is Baba. The zoo used to have two pangolins, but one died of digestive problems, according to Jenny Mehlow, a spokeswoman for the zoo. It's hard to overstate the amount of stress that trafficking routes put on pangolins. They're not happy travelers. Often they haven't had food or water for days and are perilously dehydrated.
Forty percent die within a day or two of arriving at the center, Phuong told me. The rest are injected with hydrating fluids and kept in quarantine until they can be moved to a larger cage. After standing there for a minute, I saw him breathing. It was hard to notice at first, but the hexagonal scales on his back rose and fell in a slow, oceanic motion. He must have smelled us, because his slender, toothless snout started to peek out of the ball like a cobra rising from a snake charmer's basket.
Soon, he was looking at us with curious blueberry eyes, bobbing his head and sniffing the air. After Lucky had a few dozen photos taken, a worker from Pangolin Rehab picked up the pangolin -- wait, what?
I tried to refuse at first, but I could tell this was happening whether I wanted it to or not. He felt like a lump of bricks in my arms, and a squirmy one. He's one of the biggest pangolins in the world in captivity, Phuong told me.
He weighs about 8 kilos, or 17 pounds. Lucky wrapped his girthy pangolin body around my forearm, scales and claws pinching my skin, and held on tight. His stomach was warm and hairy, a somewhat awkward reminder that this otherwise reptilian-looking thing is actually a mammal. His body clamped around my arm like a giant snap bracelet. A fter meeting Lucky, I sat in the office at Pangolin Rehab with Phuong and rattled off what I thought would be a ridiculously softball list of questions about pangolins:.
Phuong, who has talked about pangolins at international conferences, couldn't answer any of these with specificity. No one can. It's known that pangolins can live up to 20 years in captivity, for example, but it's not clear exactly how long they live in the wild. Pangolins eat ants, termites and various larvae, but it's also possible they consume bee larvae, flies, worms and crickets, according to a technical review of pangolin diets and husbandry. Estimates on their weight range from 4 to 72 pounds.
A waitress in Hanoi, Vietnam, shows how pangolin is prepared. Pangolins are traded by the ton, frozen and alive.
They're sometimes mixed with frozen fish or snakes as cover. Governments and international conservation organizations tend to put their muscle behind "charismatic" species like the rhino or elephant, which are seen in zoos worldwide and are universally beloved. But pangolins, as a volunteer at Pangolin Rehab, Thai Van Nguyen, explained it to me, are "not a very attractive species -- not beautiful, not colorful.
It's true that more attention has been coming the pangolin's way recently. The main celebration seemed to be rallying support online.
And, out of dumb luck and because he's a nice guy, I somehow persuaded the creator of that "honey badger" YouTube video to make a new hopefully viral video about pangolins as part of this story. But the pangolin, as writer Richard Conniff put it, is still "obscure" at best.
When I tell people about pangolins, they often think I'm saying "penguin" with some newly acquired Paula Deen accent. The Pangolin Rehab researchers and others don't see it as an accident that we know so little about pangolins. It's a bias, and I agree. An update is due out later this year, but the only thing clear about pangolin science is how little of it is being done, and that's because so little of it is being funded. What we're left with is anecdotal evidence, like the stories I heard from Thai in Vietnam.
He grew up here, not far from Cuc Phuong National Park, and remembers seeing pangolins outside the park when he was a kid. Now, he said, it would be impossible to find a wild pangolin anywhere nearby.
You could sit outside all night -- night after night -- and never, ever see one. That's weird, I know, but it's not entirely without precedent. A few years ago, children's author Anna Dewdney if you have young kids, they probably know her "Llama Llama" series visited Cuc Phong to see pangolins before she wrote the book, "Roly Poly Pangolin," about a shy animal that learns to make friends. She based it on her experiences at the park. They're very shy.
They're like small children. So they don't warm up to you right away but once they know you, they bond. Her boyfriend recommended she look into doing a book on pangolins because he'd read about them somewhere, and they reminded him of her. I would go to my room and shut the door. And it's still what I do. I can't live in a city because of the constant barrage of things and people. I live in Vermont where it's generally very quiet.
Pangolins do that at any given moment. They just curl up into a ball and they are in their own little world in that way. Literally, they look like a little round planet. Pangolins are trafficked by land and sea in Southeast Asia and China.
As supplies dwindle in the region, pangolin is also being sourced from Africa, experts say. Source: Education for Nature Vietnam. I'm not much of a visual artist, but I think almost anyone can see a bit of themselves in those stories. I was an awkward kid, bad at baseball, good at gymnastics; I think all of us encounter situations in which it might be advantageous to curl up into a ball of armor and safely wait out the world.
I would feel that way later on this trip, in Sumatra, meeting with the mafia-esque wildlife traffickers. At Cuc Phuong, I stayed in what seemed like an abandoned building. There was no heat, and the windows didn't shut all the way. I felt like a pangolin as I burrowed under all the blankets I could find, trying to stay warm during the degree nights, curling up in a ball.
My first night in the park, I stayed up late to try to see one of the nocturnal pangolins in action. It's difficult to glimpse them because they emerge from their burrows for only several minutes at a time and then return to safety. I was lucky enough to catch a pangolin known only as P21 rummaging about that night. This pangolin, I learned, was quarantined for three years three years! The night I saw her, she seemed to want to release some of that pent-up energy.
At first, all I heard was a sound -- the clanging of a fence, which sounded like a person banging on a typewriter. I looked up to see P21 skittering across the chain-link cage. She seemed to be enjoying herself, running up the fence, across a tree branch -- then, suddenly, up my thigh.
She looked at me cockeyed for a moment and then went back to her rounds. Remember the viral video about the honey badger? That guy made a new video about pangolins in collaboration with CNN. Watch it here. Read full story ». All that was cute, but P21 won me over when she latched her back legs and muscular tail onto the fence and levitated into the air -- her entire body stretched out horizontally, her claws reaching forward in a Superwoman pangolin pose. Phuong brought an ant nest and propped it up in his cage.
It wasn't long before he smelled the ants. Lucky's not as quick-moving as the other pangolins, but there was something magical about seeing him in his element -- out in his cage at night.
It's usually true that the more time you spend trying to get to know someone, the better you identify with him or her, and the more you like each other.
That was the case with Lucky and me. I learned -- when he wasn't attached to my arm -- that Lucky is the only pangolin at Pangolin Rehab with a nickname. He got it from Thai, the spiky-haired, motorcycle-riding volunteer who rescued him from a warehouse in December , after the government seized some pangolins.
Officials told Thai, as he recounted it to me, that he only could rescue the five pangolins that weighed the least. Pangolins, like cocaine, are sold by weight. And the officials planned to resell the heavier pangolins at auction to benefit the government. That corrupt but formerly legal practice has since been discontinued, a government environmental official told me. He did not deny that such auctions had taken place in the past. Environmentalists would prefer the pangolins be euthanized so they don't go into the illegal market and end up feeding demand for the animals.
If you answered yes to any of these questions then -- congratulations! Maybe it's best to keep this to yourself T here were six pangolins when I arrived at Pangolin Rehab and five by the time I left. CNN readers are going to come up with a better name for this uber-shy pangolin. He's currently known as P His car arrived around 4 a. I met Phuong around 3 to watch him get the paperwork ready.
The previous day, he'd affixed a radio-tracking device to P26's tail by drilling two holes in one of his scales. P26 is doing what Phuong hopes all of the pangolins here will eventually do: He's going back to the wild, to a national park in the south of Vietnam, where the climate is warmer and the threat of being hunted is a little lower.
Researchers are trying to prove such releases are viable, but three of the pangolins have lost their tracking devices Phuong put P26's lower on his tail, in hopes that might help and one of their transmitter batteries died. In January, one of the pangolins that had been released died as well. Lucky, one of the other pangolins that's gotten to him personally, likely will never be released into a park, Phuong told me.
The researchers give the pangolins tests to see if they're ready for release. They hide their food, bury it slightly underground, monitor them more closely. The goal is to see if they're ready to fend for themselves in the wild -- or if they've gotten accustomed to life in captivity.
I kept my headlamp on as I followed Phuong past the vats of foot disinfectant and to the quarantine cage where P26 was waiting. Phuong helped move him into a wooden box he'd made by hand. It's the kind of animal carrier you'd expect to see in a cartoon: holes on the side for air, packing slip attached to the top. I could tell Phuong was worried as he watched the car disappear in the pre-dawn darkness.
This was no "Free Willy" moment. He didn't budge. So they left the box out there overnight, hoping this pangolin -- thought to be the shyest of all these Morrissey types -- finally would get up the nerve to leave. I said goodbye to the Pangolin Rehab center early the next day, thinking how lucky I was to have met some of these amazingly bizarre animals, each with its own personality and characteristics.
P8 is huge. P26 is shy. P21 is an acrobat. There's something wonderful about encountering a creature you had no idea existed, and that millions of years of evolution helped create. The earliest pangolin fossils date back to the Eocene epoch, 35 million to 55 million years ago, shortly after the dinosaurs went extinct.
It once was thought that pangolins were most closely related to anteaters, sloths and armadillos. New evidence, however, suggests they may be more similar to carnivorans, a diverse group of animals that includes cats, civets, dogs and pandas. All eight species of pangolin, four in Africa and four in Asia, are in the order Pholidota, which is made up entirely of pangolins. The name pangolin comes from a Malay word meaning "one that rolls up. Just realizing they're alive -- and in such an otherworldly form -- has a certain magic to it.
And then there are all the little surprises -- that P21 can levitate; that P8's sniffing sounds like a DustBuster; that their scales feel like balsa wood; and that they can cover their eyes and ears so ants don't crawl in while they're eating. F rom Cuc Phuong National Park, I drove to Hanoi, a bustling, old-world city that's overrun by honking motorbikes and old women wearing cone-shaped hats. The city is known for its spicy pho , or noodle soup, which customers eat while sitting at plastic, outdoor tables sized for 2-year-olds.
The soup is lovely. You often don't have to order. Just sit down and a bucket-sized bowl arrives in no time, clouds of steam rising from the broth. With the help of a wildlife crime investigator from the group Education for Nature Vietnam, I went out in search of restaurants that sell pangolin meat. I was a little nervous about this for several reasons: It's illegal to buy and sell pangolin; I was filming with a hidden camera; and I really didn't want to eat a pangolin.
My editor, however, did want me to order it -- both to prove that it's possible and to find out what it tastes like. What if it's delicious? Like I'm going to come back proclaiming pangolin the new pork belly? The first stop we made was at a high-end restaurant with a regal-looking lion etched into its window.
The entryway was lined with fish tanks, and the hostess stood beside a fan of peacock feathers fashioned into a kind of indoor palm tree. All of the waitresses were dressed alike: sherbet-orange blazers and gold polka-dot dresses.
One showed us a menu. In the "wild animal" section, near the back, was a picture of a live pangolin. Imagine, for a moment, a U. Pangolin could be prepared in about 30 minutes, a waitress said with a smile. You have to order it whole, at a minimum of 5 kilos 11 pounds. I considered ordering it right then, although I wondered how I would account for an endangered-animal meal on a CNN expense report. The only time pangolins spend time together is when they mate and bear young.
Some pangolin fathers will stay in the den until the single offspring is independent. All rights reserved. Common Name: Pangolins. Scientific Name: Manidae. Diet: Insectivore. Average Life Span: unknown. Size: 45 inches to 4. Weight: 4 to 72 pounds. Current Population Trend: Decreasing. Share Tweet Email.
Go Further. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Login Profile. Es En. Economy Humanities Science Technology. Leading Figures. Multimedia OpenMind books Authors. Digital World. Featured author. Maria Engberg. Latest book. Work in the Age of Data. Science Bioscience. Animals Biodiversity Biology Sustainability. Ventana al Conocimiento Knowledge Window. Estimated reading time Time 4 to read.
A giant ground pangolin. Credit: David Brossard. The large-scale illegal trade in Asian pangolins is drastically driving down their numbers, and pangolin trafficking is now huge and illegal business.
Even though pangolin scales are made of exactly the same stuff as your fingernails, they are being slaughtered by their thousands because some people believe that their scales have magical medicinal properties.
In , the government of Cameroon burned 8 tonnes of confiscated pangolin scales, which works out at around murdered animals. You can read more about the burning here. When it is threatened, a pangolin will curl itself into a tight ball, which is impenetrable to predators.
Pangolins mostly eat ants and termites, although they will eat a few other invertebrates as well. A single pangolin can consume up to 20, ants a day.
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