This big pangolin was caught on digicam in Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba Nationwide Park on 8 March 2023
Panthera/DPN
A large pangolin has been noticed in Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba Nationwide Park for the primary time in 24 years, reviving hope that the endangered animal has survived within the nation.
“Nobody suspected that the pangolin is still alive in [this park],” says Mouhamadou Mody Ndiaye on the wildlife monitoring organisation Panthera.
The enormous pangolin (Smutsia gigantea) – the one considered one of Africa’s 4 pangolin species regarded as current in Senegal – beforehand inhabited a variety of forests and savannahs spanning Senegal to western Kenya. However in latest many years, the scaly mammal’s inhabitants has declined as a result of intensive deforestation, together with poaching for its meat and scales. Experiences counsel greater than 8 million pangolins had been poached in West and Central Africa between 2014 and 2021, making them some of the regularly trafficked animals on the planet.
Large pangolins are shy, solitary and nocturnal – so unlikely to be discovered typically outdoors of their burrows. A large pangolin was final captured and formally recognized in Senegal in April 1967. Three many years later, an ecological survey found two people. Since then, conservationists haven’t noticed a single big pangolin.
That’s, till 8 March 2023, when one was snapped plodding alongside a dry riverbed at 1.37am. The snapshot was captured by considered one of 217 survey digicam traps scattered all through greater than 4000 sq. kilometers of the Niokolo-Koba Nationwide Park.
“When we saw the young pangolin it was very, very exciting,” says Ndiaye.
This sighting suggests Niokolo-Koba Nationwide Park might function the final stronghold for monitoring and conserving the pangolin in Senegal, says Alain D. T. Mouafo on the Worldwide Union for Conservation of Nature’s Pangolin Specialist Group. That is particularly crucial as a result of there are numerous suspected “local extinctions”, or areas the place the species is now not energetic, he says.
“This sighting offers a glimmer of hope for their survival in West Africa and can be used to raise public awareness about the plight of pangolins,” says Mouafo, who hopes it might act as “a game changer for renewed conservation efforts”.
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