“South Africa loses between 1,000 and 2,000 pangolins each year to fence electrocutions. This far overshadows the number of individuals that are illegally poached and trafficked,” says Dr Darren Pietersen,…
KATHMANDU — Tulshi Laxmi Suwal, a Nepali conservationist, has been named one of the seven winners of this year’s prestigious Whitley Awards, known as the “Green Oscars,” in recognition of…
KATHMANDU — When Tulshi Laxmi Suwal was a student in the zoology department at Tribhuvan University in Nepal, she looked through an encyclopedia in search of interesting animals for her…
As the Philippines travel and tourism industry bounces back from the coronavirus pandemic, wildlife trade analysts are anticipating a resurgence in the poaching of the country's endemic pangolin. The enigmatic…
Lying at the nexus of South Asia, Southeast Asia and China, Myanmar hosts an extraordinary mix of ecosystems that represent some of the last refuges of an ever-lengthening list of…
COLOMBO — For decades, the small population of Indian pangolins found in Sri Lanka has faced a single consistent threat: the domestic meat market. Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy…
Amid lockdowns, travel restrictions and wet market closures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, wildlife traders shifted their business online. A trade once dominated by face-to-face interactions now sees sellers and…
In January 2019, authorities in Uganda intercepted a shipment of nearly 4 tons of elephant ivory and pangolin scales on its way to the capital, Kampala, from the neighboring Democratic…
LAGOS — Nigeria has for years failed to hold wildlife traffickers and poachers accountable for their crimes, despite federal and state laws that criminalize the killing and trading of protected…
The seizure earlier this month in Nigeria of nearly a ton of pangolin scales and elephant ivory bound for Asia has once again highlighted the plight of pangolins as among…
Only 14% of wildlife seizures made in Vietnam in the past decade have resulted in convictions, according to a new report that highlights the weak enforcement in the country and…
When Elisa Panjang was 10 years old, playing outside her home in Sandakan, a small town in Malaysian Borneo, she heard a snuffling sound near the forest’s edge. As she…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This month we’re meeting the world’s most trafficked mammal: the Sunda…
CROSS RIVER NATIONAL PARK, Nigeria — It wasn’t supposed to be this straightforward. For days, we’d crisscrossed rainforest-blanketed mountains, hacked through thorny thickets and corkscrewing lianas, narrowly escaped rockfalls, and…
Nigeria’s emergence as a trafficking hub for illegal wildlife appears unhindered by the coronavirus pandemic. Between 2016 and 2019, some 200 metric tons of pangolin scales were seized by law…
Authorities at the Nigeria Customs Service have announced the seizure of 7.1 tons of pangolin scales that smugglers were attempting to ship out of the country. According to customs officials,…
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) contains the bulk of Africa’s humid rainforest. But forests that were once dense, impenetrable and continuous are increasingly fractured by deforestation. New satellite…
MANILA — When COVID-19 emerged in early 2020 in Southeast Asia, its governments took rapid containment actions: lockdowns, travel restrictions and trade suspensions, alerting the public about the virus. The…
Covering a vast peninsula that juts out into the Gulf of Thailand on Cambodia’s southern coast, Botum Sakor is one of the largest national parks in the country and known…
MANILA — Palawan is an outlier in the Philippine archipelago, its topography and habitat closer to that of Borneo than the rest of the country’s major islands. This so-called last…
MANILA — Knowledge of the Philippine pangolin, the only pangolin species in the country, is scant. Sightings of the animal are rarer still. But unlike other pangolin species around the…
Indonesia’s Kerinci Seblat National Park is the largest national park on the island of Sumatra and the second-largest park in Southeast Asia. It is home to a wide variety of…
When Singaporean customs officials opened a shipping container en route to Vietnam from Nigeria on April 3, 2019, they found piles of canvas sacks stuffed full of dusty, dried flakes.…
Pangolin scales — armor-like, keratin-based plates that cover a pangolin’s body — are still being used in medicines sold and produced by Chinese companies, a new report has found. This…
Ally arrived at the veterinary hospital the way most rescued pangolins do: underweight, dehydrated and suffering from pneumonia. But a routine ultrasound revealed that Ally wasn’t a typical patient —…
PALAWAN, Philippines — At the heart of the island province of Palawan in the western Philippines, a verdant mountain range larger than Bangkok stands like a natural bulwark. It’s a…
When the wild pangolin was rescued, she was in bad shape: dehydrated, emaciated, and weighing a mere 4.9 kilograms (10.8 pounds). She was also very young, but this was a…
A single, wild pangolin wandered across a golf course in the Philippine’s Cavite province in March 2018. When the golf club staff spotted the scaly anteater, which was hundreds of…
On March 30, authorities in Nigeria imposed a lockdown on the commercial city of Lagos, neighboring Ogun state, and the capital city Abuja. As COVID-19 spread to all 36 of…
In early June, it was widely reported that the Chinese government had banned pangolin scales in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), and that all pangolin species now had the highest level…
