*humming*
Hey, guys!
The other night I asked you on Facebook and Twitter to decide between a polar bear, a sloth, and a pangolin
and the winner is
sloths!
Just kidding, the title of the episode is pangolins.
I get a lot of questions about what my favorite specimen is in the collection
and, uh, after much deliberation and serious consideration,
I came to the conclusion that it is probably the pangolin. And this is for a multitude of reasons.
For one, um, I'm really surprised that we have one in our collection,
'cause pangolins are typically found in parts of Africa
and different tropical parts of Asia, so the fact that we have one in Montana is a little unlikely and really cool.
Another reason I like pangolins is because they are very unique looking.
They have a couple different kinds of common names, sometimes they're called "the walking artichoke"
or "anteater pine cones" because that's basically what they look like.
They are covered in keratin scales and keratin, if you watched the last episode,
you know is modified hair and fingernails.
So they have this armor that covers the entirety of their body excluding their soft bellies.
It acts as armored defense against predators,
they have really long tails that they can curl over their heads when they're threatened
and they kind of hide in these little balls
and the scales on their tail are serrated to a certain extent
so they also will wiggle their tails around and act as a weapon.
Another reason I really like pangolins is because they are one of the only mammals that walks bipedaly.
You might notice that they have really formidable looking claws on their forelimbs
but they don't really use these for fighting.
Um, and their claws are a little bit brittle, so they don't walk with putting any pressure on them,
they kind of tuck them under their bodies and then they'll hobble when they walk
and use their tail to help them balance, so they kinda look like little hobbits.
Really adorable.
They use these claws for digging into termite and anthill mounds.
Uh, a single pangolin can consume up to 70 million ants by itself annually
and they do this because they have the longest tongue relative to its body size of any other mammal.
Their tongue is so long that it has muscle attachments on its pelvis.
So they use this really long tongue to stick it all the way down into these anthills
and suck up all these other ants; they don't have any teeth, so they will ingest rocks and other kinds of
hard materials that help to grind up the ants in their stomachs.
And even though they are primarily ant eaters, they aren't actually "anteaters" as you might know them,
they are in totally different orders than the giant anteater or even armadillos.
They're kind of like a mash up between an armadillo and an anteater but they're physiologically so unique
that they're in their own order.
As they are right now, pangolins aren't on any kind of threatened or endangered species list
but, um, hopefully that will change sometime soon, because they've been subjected to a lot of poaching
and illegal trafficking.
For one thing, their meat is considered a delicacy so they're hunted freely
without any kind of legal implications.
Their scales--their keratin scales are also being used in Eastern medicine
and, uh, as we know from, you know, learning about rhino horns and rhino poaching, uh,
keratin has no medicinal value whatsoever.
So, um, it's a little unfortunate that that's a misconception and it's leading to, um, fast population decline with these species.
However, um, with awareness we can hopefully change that
because pangolins are awesome and I would looove to see one someday.
In person.
Not dead.