Critically Endangered
Chinese pangolin
Manis pentadactyla
The Chinese pangolin is a pangolin native to the northern Indian subcontinent, northern parts of Southeast Asia and southern China.
Appearance
Its scales are typically grayish blue. It has 18 rows of overlapping scales accompanied by hair, a rare combination in mammals. The young are born with soft scales, that harden after two days.
Its head and body measure about 40–58 cm (16–23 in) and its tail measures about 25–38 cm (9.8–15.0 in).
Range and habitat
The Chinese pangolin is native to southern Nepal, northeast India, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, northern Indochina, southern China among them the island of Hainan and most of Taiwan. It formerly ranged throughout provinces south of the Yangtze River, as well as north of the Yangtze River in southern Sichuan, northeast Chongqing, northwest Hubei and southwest Henan Provinces. Currently, confirmed populations in mainland China are known in Yunnan, Hainan, Guangxi, Guangdong, Hunan, Chongqing, Fujian, Jiangxi, Zhejiang and Anhui provinces.
In 2016, CITES moved the Chinese pangolin from its Appendix II, designating species not directly threatened with extinction but in need of protection to prevent exploitation, to Appendix I, reserved for species most directly threatened with extinction.
Habitat labels include shrubland.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
The Chinese pangolin is a rather secretive, nocturnal animal. The invasive yellow crazy ant was also present in the stomach contents, a species commonly found near human settlements and at forest edges rather than in undisturbed forest, suggesting this individual foraged at forest margins, unlike the disturbance-avoiding behavior observed within heavily hunted rural populations.
Due to its specific diet, it can become arduous to provide the appropriate food for captive animals.
In crisis
It has been listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2014, as the wild population is estimated to have declined by more than 80% in three pangolin generations, equal to 21 years. It is threatened by poaching for the illegal wildlife trade. The Chinese pangolin is threatened foremost by poaching.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in 2002 prohibited selling pangolins across national borders. Even though pangolins have been protected by legislation since the 1970s and 1980s, people still choose to hunt these endangered animals.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Chinese pangolin is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Chinese pangolin, Wikidata item Q842283. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
