189 Breakthrough Map Reveals Supply Chain of the World's Most Trafficked Mammal Pangolins look like a mix of an armadillo, a pinecone, and a baby dinosaur, with a curious tendency to shuffle upright on their two back feet, and hundreds of tiny scales that keep them safe from predators. Except for humans. Over the past decade, demand for their meat and scales, which are valued as traditional medicine across East Asia, has driven Asian pangolin populations to near extinction. At the same time, poaching of African pangolins has placed all other species of pangolins in danger, and made Africa’s whitebellied pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis) the most trafficked mammal in the world. In 2019, 14 tons of scales (equal to 36,000 poached pangolins) were confiscated in Singapore. In 2023, a ton of scales were seized in Bangkok, Thailand. Pinpointing where exactly they are being poached has proven challenging for authorities. Many pangolin scales still end up in East Asia, where demand is highest, but the animals range widely across sub-Saharan Africa. And typical analysis techniques are “not really at a scale that law enforcement can use to map poaching hot spots and figure out where they need to be prioritizing their efforts,” says Jen Tinsman, a forensic scientist at the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory and a researcher at the UCLA Center for Tropical Research. So Tinsman and a group of colleagues at UCLA and elsewhere gathered genetic data from trafficked pangolin scales to build a new kind of map, one that can identify poaching hot spots within tens of kilometers. The researchers outlined their results in a new paper, published in Science in December 2023. Safeguarding Habitats and Wildlife Africa’s white-bellied pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis) is the most trafficked mammal in the world.
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