A few years ago, nobody would ever have suspected that one of the biggest icons of wildlife conservation would be a small, obscure, scaly anteater. Back then, few people outside of conservation circles would have even known about pangolins, much less of the heavy poaching of them for the Chinese medicine trade.
Pangolin: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Manis_pentadactyla_(29054818144).jpg
Nowadays however, the plight of the pangolin has been well publicised and while it’s probably too early to say whether it has come in time to save it, this increased awareness has certainly spurred much more concerted conservation action from NGOs and researchers, one of whom works in one of the last places one might expect pangolins to be: Hong Kong.
Pangolin scales: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pangolin_scale_burn_in_Cameroon._Credit-_Linh_Nguyen_Ngoc_Bao_-_MENTOR-POP_(4)_(32956129875).jpg
This SCMP article highlights the extremely perilous situation that pangolins are facing.
“China’s pangolin population has dropped over 90 per cent from the 1960s to 2004 due to poaching…The Chinese pangolin has been “commercially extinct” since 1995, researchers say.”
Originally from Chicago, Anna Goldman stumbled into pangolin conservation almost by accident. Initially her main interest had been in insects, but she developed an unexpected love for mammals when she was offered a job processing their bodies for museum collections. So when she started a PhD at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), she was keen for it to focus on the interactions between these two animal groups.
“I started trying to look at mammal and insect interactions, competition pressures, any way that I could put these two together” she says.
She eventually found that mix when she chose to focus on the effect of hill fires on ant populations in Hong Kong, which also allowed the possibility to study the food resources and local distribution of the Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla), as well as the effects of habitat disturbance on its main prey. Such ecological insights could potentially prove vital for the conservation of this critically endangered species in a place where encroachment of development into protected country parks is a constant threat.
For the time being however, much of this ecological knowledge remains untapped as research on Chinese pangolin ecology has historically been very limited and Anna’s PhD is still in a very early stage. Nonetheless, what she has discovered so far has put things on a promising track.
“We have identified pangolin burrows […] and because of this knowledge, we can now conduct burrow transect surveys to try to estimate their locations across Hong Kong and also general burrow density.”
Burrow density is important as it can be used to indicate pangolin density, and although the exact numbers have yet to materialise, there are reasons to be optimistic about the state of Hong Kong’s pangolin population.
Anna Goldman
“In terms of places within the distribution of the Chinese pangolin, Hong Kong populations are probably doing better” says Dr Timothy Bonebrake, an associate professor at HKU and Anna’s supervisor. “One of the things that Hong Kong has to its advantage is the number and size of its country parks. And because these country parks are well protected, there’s a reasonable assumption that there are pangolins that are persisting in these areas.”
So what does this have to do with Masarang HK?
Masarang HK committee were keen to assist in a conservation project for native mammals in Hong Kong. When they learned of this pangolin project they donated a generous sum of money for up-to-date camera traps that send any videos or photos they take to a mobile phone. This allows Anna to know about pangolin movements in real time and provides previously hard-to-get information on a whole range of issues from burrow usage and re-usage to pangolin behaviours. These new camera traps also provide much better images than the ones she had been previously using.
It still remains to be seen what she will find, but Anna for one has high hopes for the conservation applicability of her project.
Pangolin Camera Trap Image in HK
“Hopefully we can share this data with the Hong Kong government and the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) and aid in the conservation and future persistence of Hong Kong pangolins.”
We are proud to support this project and wish Anna and Dr Bonebrake every success in their research.
Please Donate What You Can, When You Can.
Masarang HK Team
Leave a Reply