The worlds most-trafficked mammal may also be its most obscure

The scales arrived in bulging, stained bags. Hundreds of them.

They sailed into a Singapore inspection port by shipping container, the vessel marked “frozen beef” and bound for Vietnam. Inside, customs officials found the sacks, packed and piled from floor to ceiling. They overflowed with the product of a wildlife smuggling operation so vast, yet so niche, it had conservationists worried about the extinction of an animal that most people haven’t even heard of yet.

The scales — 14 tons (12.7 tonnes) of them — belonged to roughly 36,000 poached pangolins. it's the largest-ever seizure of its kind, another grim superlative for the pangolin , which is believed to be the most-trafficked mammal within the world.

“We’re hearing the last death knell of pangolins,” said Crawford Allen, the senior director of TRAFFIC, which monitors animal trade for the planet Wild Life Fund. “This is our last chance to save lots of them. they can't sustain this level of poaching and trafficking.”

The diverted haul, which originated in Nigeria, would are worth nearly $39 million, officials said during a statement last week.

The case of the pangolin, native to parts of Africa and Asia, illustrates the problem of cracking down on the illicit global trade of exotic wildlife. The conservation cause suffers from a scarcity of public awareness; yet, the more people realize pangolins, the more popular they become. And when animals get popular, business booms for poachers and smugglers.

Over the last decade, a classy criminal network has developed methods of selling trafficked animals to consumers round the world, Allen said, convincing wealthy folks that elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns are the newest status symbol or medicinal panacea.

But pangolins, he said, are even more vulnerable than their forebears. In China and Vietnam, where most buyers live, several segments of the black market consider them desirable.

Restaurants buy pangolin meat, which is taken into account a delicacy, an off-menu item that a well-heeled customer might order when trying to impress. Those seeking the new cure-all buy the scales, which are utilized in traditional medicine to treat everything from rheumatism to cancer, albeit there's no known science that supports their remedial properties. and therefore the apparel industry has shown interest within the skin, its diamond pattern making for a beautiful leather design. It’s scale-to-tail consumption.

“The poor pangolins have an enormous target on their backs,” said Paul Thomson, the vice-chair of the Pangolin Specialist Group and therefore the co-founder of Save Pangolins. “To me, it’s a crisis.”

The International Union for Conservation of Nature now considers all eight pangolin species to be threatened with extinction. Two of these species are critically endangered. A pangolin disappearance would have reverberations throughout their habitats, Thomson said.

“They’re so evolutionary distinct that losing pangolins would mean we lose a key a part of our biodiversity,” he said.

They resemble real-life Pokémon, covered in scales that resemble artichoke leaves. they need a penchant for burrowing, tunnelling underground in search of the ants and termites on which they survive. When in peril , they curl into a ball, an evolutionary trait that has made them even more vulnerable to poaching, since an individual can simply pick it up off the bottom . they will weigh as little as three and a half pounds and the maximum amount as 75. They’re nocturnal, solitary and difficult for scientists to review . And experts don’t even skills many remain.

“When I see 36,000 vacuumed out of West and Central African Republic , i actually wonder: what percentage can there be left?” Thomson said.

The nascent community of pangolin conservationists is within the process of answering that question, trying to conduct a transcontinental survey to work out what percentage are still within the wild.

But within the meantime, high-profile seizures just like the one in Singapore — and two others in Malaysia and Hong Kong in February — should function a warning call for international regulatory agencies, Allen said. Next month’s Convention on International trade species could provide a key opportunity for countries to coordinate a worldwide response, he said. it had been at CITES 2016 that pangolin trading was first formally banned.

Since then, law of nations enforcement has done a far better job spotting smuggled pangolins or pangolin scales, Allen said, but agents rarely catch traffickers within the act. More often they find yourself with a shipping container filled with contraband and no suspects.

Authorities may have more success working with social media sites and online marketplaces — Facebook, Instagram and Alibaba among them — to tamp on online sales, Allen said. And advocates, Thomson added, can do their part by educating the general public . A recent shout out from Hillary Clinton and John Kasich probably won’t hurt, either.

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