Pangolin, which was common in the south 60 years ago, has now disappeared. The largest number of pangolins in China was 900,000 in 1960s, and now the number has dropped by more than 97%. A timid, harmless, well-defended animal with no natural enemies was hunted to extinction by humans who did not worry about eating and drinking.
Can pangolins wear mountains?
Pangolin, as its name implies, is an ancient animal that wears armor and digs holes. It has lived on the earth for 40 million years.
Digging holes is pangolin's greatest skill, and it depends on digging holes to eat and live. The mountains that pangolins can penetrate are mud mounds, but they can't dig through stone mountains. Slow-walking pangolins dig holes as fast as machines. Two strong front paws can throw away gravel soil and dig a hole as deep as 1 m in half an hour.
Pangolin comes out at night and day, and comes out for food at night. Its main food is ants and termites. Pangolin has poor eyesight, but it has good hearing and smell. It looks for traces of ants by its nose. After finding the ant nest, dig a shallow hole and probe into the body. Pangolin has a diaphragm in its ears and nostrils. When it gets into the nest, it can close its ears and nostrils to prevent ants from invading, and only stick out its long tongue to lick ants.
Pangolin with scales and long tongue looks like a lizard, but it is not a warm reptile, but a warm mammal. Scales and long tongues are two characteristics that distinguish pangolins from other mammals. The scale is introduced in another article. Let's look at its tongue structure first.
The picture above is a schematic diagram of pangolin tongue. There are two tongues in the picture, one for use and the other for relaxing and folding.
Your tongue root and throat are connected together. The tongue root of pangolin not only grows into the stomach, but also can be coiled in a circle in the stomach. Its long tongue is divided into two parts, which extend out of the body and exist in the body.
Pangolin has a small, pointed mouth, and its long tongue can't fit without teeth. It has a throat bag at its throat, and a piece of tongue will be folded and put in the throat bag. When it licks the ant, the folded tongue will pop out of its mouth, which is twice as long as relaxing.
Just like your tongue, pangolin has a moving bone on its tongue. Your movable hyoid is located in the neck, while pangolin's hyoid is located at the bottom of the sternum. The skeletal muscle attached to the hyoid bone controls the extension of the tongue.
The tongue is strong and the salivary glands are developed. Pangolin's slender tongue is covered with sticky saliva, which can stick to ants and swallow them into the stomach. Because there are no teeth, like chickens and birds, pangolins lick a little gravel to help digestion when eating ants.
A pangolin in China can eat 500 termites in one meal and tens of millions of termites and ants in a year. Although eating a lot, pangolins eat in moderation. When it digs a hole to eat ants, it only eats a part and leaves, and it won't empty all the ant nests in one breath. Pangolin, which feeds on ants and termites, adjusts its diet according to the change of food quantity. In winter, there are fewer ants and more termites. Pangolin eats more termites and fewer ants. In other words, China pangolin maintains the dynamic balance between ants and termites.
Pangolin not only digs holes to eat ants, but also digs holes to sleep. The living hole is much deeper than the hole dug when eating ants. Find a hidden place, dig the hole deeper, and you can sleep well. Pangolin, which likes hot flashes, has a high humidity in its cave and the temperature is kept between 18 ~ 27 degrees.
The timid pangolin is a solitary animal and only likes to move. 10 days later, it will leave its old home and dig a hole in another place as its new home. This ancient cave is hidden and safe, and it is very popular with other animals. When it moves, the snake-eating tortoise and the weasel badger will take over the second-hand house and make it their home. Make the best use of everything, pangolin's labor has not been in vain.
Do pangolins all live in caves?
Although it is called pangolin, not all pangolins dig holes to build nests. Four of the eight pangolins, Malay pangolin, Philippine pangolin, long-tailed pangolin and tree pangolin, live in trees.
Pangolin living in a tree Pangolin living in a tree curled up on a branch, or found a tree hole to sleep, rarely working in the fields. Compared with pangolins living underground, their most prominent feature is their flexible long tail. Tree pangolin, which is only 40 cm long, has a tail longer than its body and can be as long as 60 cm. Its long tail is as flexible as a monkey's tail, and it can hang its body on a branch. The long-tailed pangolin has 46 or 47 coccygeal vertebrae, which is the record holder for the largest number of coccygeal vertebrae in mammals.
Pangolins living in trees like swimming and climbing trees. They will swallow air into their stomachs and increase buoyancy. The speed of swimming is no less than that of climbing trees.
South African pangolin that walks only on two legs South African pangolin is the only pangolin that walks only on its hind legs among the eight pangolins. Curl up the forelimbs, stretch the tail to keep balance, and move forward with only the hind legs, winning the true biography of Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Unlike other pangolins that like to eat termites, South African pangolins mainly eat ants and only eat a small amount of termites. It spends five hours wandering in the bushes every day looking for an ant nest. Although the walking speed is very slow, one day is also 10 km. Interestingly, although pangolins are Nocturnal Animals, they usually come out for food at night. But in winter, South African pangolins will come out to find ants to eat during the day.
What is the weakness of pangolin?
Pangolin has few natural enemies except humans who eat pangolin's meat and tear off pangolin's scales. Few animals can break through the first-class defense equipment of pangolin. Its armor can catch the lion's claws and fangs. Pangolin has no natural enemies, but its number is limited for two reasons. One is that picky eaters have low immunity, and the other is that the reproduction rate is low.
Pangolin only gives birth to one child a year, and each child only gives birth to one baby. When the baby was born, it was a soft mass of meat without hard scales. If the mother who raises the baby alone goes out for food, the mongoose who eats crabs will sneak into the hole to eat the meat baby. In order to protect the baby, the mother will reduce the frequency of going out for food, and the time to go out at 9 pm will be postponed to 12.
After 2 months, the baby's scales began to keratinize and his head grew up. At this time, the baby will climb on the mother's tail and follow her out of the hole to find ants to eat. I followed my mother until she was half a year old, and the baby began to live independently.
It is difficult to raise a timid pangolin. Most pangolins can't live more than 200 days in the zoo. Pangolin in captivity often gets sick, and improper food will lead to gastric ulcer and intestinal bleeding. Many pangolins died directly because of tension and stress.
Who is the natural enemy of pangolin?
Pangolin, which can't be raised artificially and has low fertility, will drop sharply once it is coveted by human beings. Scales make medicine, while bodies make soup. Pangolin is full of treasures. Curious humans catch pangolins in Asia and then go to Africa to catch them.
The number of pangolins is getting less and less, and the value is getting higher and higher. Things are scarce, and pangolin has become a good dish for entertaining dignitaries. Pangolin is a popular game choice in the eyes of seriously curious diners. In the eyes of ordinary people, pangolin is an animal that has nothing to do with itself. This is unprecedented and unprecedented.
It was not until February this year that pangolin came to the stage from obscurity behind the scenes and received public attention. The reason is very helpless, because "South China Agricultural University announced the latest research and found that pangolin is a potential intermediate host in novel coronavirus."
Carrying COVID-19 is not a bad thing for pangolins. The eaters who covet their meat have retreated, and the indifferent public has begun to pay attention to pangolins. When people began to care about pangolin, they found that we knew too little about it. Pangolins are hard to track in the wild, and we don't even know their life span.
An ancient animal that has lived peacefully on the earth for 40 million years has finally reached a turning point in its fate when it is about to be killed and extinct by human beings.
Protecting animals is actually a helpless move. Only when animals don't need human protection can they really have security. I hope pangolin can wait until that day.