Endangered
Indian pangolin
Manis crassicaudata
The Indian pangolin is a pangolin native to the Indian subcontinent.
Appearance
The pangolin possesses a cone-shaped head with small, dark eyes, and a long muzzle with a nose pad similar in color, or darker than, its pinkish-brown skin. The most noticeable characteristic of the pangolin is its massive, scaled armour that covers its upper face and its whole body with the exception of the belly and the inside of the legs. It has 160–200 scales in total, about 40–46% of that are located on the tail.
It is about 84–122 cm (33–48 in) long from head to tail, the tail usually being 33–47 cm (13–19 in) long, and weighs 10–16 kg (22–35 lb).
Range and habitat
The Indian pangolin has been recorded in various forest types, among them Sri Lankan rainforest and plains to middle hill levels. It inhabits grasslands and secondary forests, and is well adapted to dry areas and desert regions, but prefers more barren, hilly regions. In Sri Lanka, it was sighted at an elevation of 1,100 m (3,600 ft), and in the Nilgiri mountains at 2,300 m (7,500 ft).
Habitat labels include savanna and forest.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The Indian pangolin is nocturnal and mostly active intermittently between 17:00 and 05:00 hr. The Indian pangolin does not climb trees, but it does value the presence of trees, herbs, and shrubs in its habitat because it is easier to dig burrows around them.
Feeding burrows are smaller than living burrows (though their sizes vary depending on the abundance of prey) and are created more frequently during the spring, when there is a greater availability of prey. Few details are known about the breeding behaviour of the Indian pangolin.
In crisis
It can also curl itself into a ball as self-defence against predators such as the tiger. It is not common anywhere in its range, and is threatened by hunting for its meat and various body parts used in traditional medicine. The Indian pangolin is threatened by poaching for its meat and scales, that are used and consumed by local people, but are also increasingly traded internationally.
Other threats include habitat loss, e.g. Through deforestation.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Indian pangolin is 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 Indian pangolin, Wikidata item Q752467. 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.
