193 Safeguarding Habitats and Wildlife Eventually the team were able to analyze the scales at a cost of about $8 a sample, with results delivered in under a week. “Getting to that point was a lot of work,” she says, “but that was the goal of the project: to make a quick and simple assay, where you can run 94 samples at a go, so 94 different confiscated scales.” More generally, maps like these could help capture the public’s attention, by instantly illustrating the impact that demand has on faraway—and increasingly connected— ecosystems. “You need a map to understand the whole story,” Tinsman said. Consider the typical pangolin supply chain. Hunters in countries in Central Africa sell an animal to a middleman for around $10, “which is a lot of money for them, but nothing for the middleman.” Locals will eat or sell the meat, but the scales are dried and gathered into overseas shipments, often in shipping containers, at ports, mostly in Nigeria. They arrive in a port in Southeast Asia, like Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, or Vietnam, before being distributed to markets across the region. “That’s so many words to just tell you what a map could show you in an instant,” Tinsman said. “So understanding the branching nature of this supply chain, you need a map for that.” And at multiple, well, scales. In addition to a map of poached pangolins across Central Africa, “you’ve got to have a big international map for how they get amassed and shipped, and then the ways that they actually take to market and the end consumer in Southeast Asia, you need a map.” Tinsman points to one key landmark, and a symbol of the shift. The founder of the Congo Basin Institute, Thomas Smith, did his dissertation research in the 1980s studying African finches at a field site in Cameroon—a beautiful, lush, intact forest. Today all of that is gone: now it’s the Kribi Deepwater Port. “That port is driving a lot of economic development into the forest for timber harvest,” she says. “And what happens when you build roads into the forest and you send people into the forest to get wood is that they harvest the local wildlife as well, and they consume wild meat. And it’s easy to just pop a dead pangolin on a truck with some timber and send it to the port as well and make some money that way.” “So all of this increasing economic activity that’s really good for Cameroon is actually really bad for Cameroon’s biodiversity.” Tinsman can see the toll registered in her locally based colleagues, the ones who are “actually caring about pangolins and getting samples and jumping through all of the permitting hoops to send stuff to the West.” “I feel very personally attached to pangolins, but it’s got to be a whole other level to work on them, to spend months trying to track one down to get a radio collar on it, and then to have them just completely bulldoze their habitat. That’s got to be hard.” Nobody Wants Another Pandemic The demand for African pangolins is largely fueled by the growth of a Chinese middle class in search of traditional medicines. Growing economic ties between China and Africa have likely accelerated the trade. And the scales, “There’s evidence they don’t do anything more than placebo. It’s like having chicken noodle soup when you’re sick.” Regulations haven’t helped much. In 2016, after years of diplomatic wrangling, pangolins were finally listed in Appendix I of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, extending to them the highest level of protection under an international agreement to regulate the wildlife trade. “Up until 2017, they were legal to trade. You had to have a permit, but it was legal to export African pangolins to anywhere you wanted.”
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