Ask most people how a ground pangolin gets its burrow and the assumption is simple: it digs one. Ground pangolins are, after all, powerful diggers, equipped with heavy foreclaws built for tearing into termite mounds and compacted soil. Yet field research on Temminck's ground pangolin (Smutsia temminckii) across South Africa's bushveld has repeatedly found something less intuitive — a large share of the burrows pangolins occupy were not dug by pangolins at all. They were dug by aardvarks.
An Underappreciated Interspecies Relationship
The aardvark is southern Africa's other great nocturnal digger, and by most measures a far more prolific one. A single aardvark can excavate several burrows within its home range and will often abandon a den after weeks or months of use, moving on to dig — or reoccupy — another. This constant churn leaves a scattered supply of vacant, structurally sound tunnels across the landscape, and ground pangolins are one of the principal beneficiaries.
This is not a formal partnership in any behavioural sense — pangolins and aardvarks do not coordinate, and there is no evidence the two species interact directly with any regularity. It is better understood as a one-directional ecological subsidy: the aardvark's digging effort creates infrastructure that a second, much less prolific digger can exploit for free.
Why Reuse Beats Excavation
Energy Economics
Digging a full den-quality burrow is metabolically expensive. Ground pangolins are not large animals, typically weighing between 7 and 18 kilograms, and their digging musculature, while powerful relative to their size, is still a fraction of an aardvark's. An aardvark burrow, particularly one of the deeper, more established systems, represents hundreds of hours of excavation the pangolin simply does not have to repeat. For an animal operating on a tight nightly energy budget built almost entirely around termite and ant intake, avoiding unnecessary digging is a meaningful saving.
Structural and Thermal Advantages
Long-used aardvark burrows tend to be deeper and more extensively tunnelled than anything a pangolin would typically dig purely for its own shelter needs. Depth matters because it buffers the extreme surface temperature swings of the South African bushveld, keeping the burrow interior cooler in summer and warmer on cold winter nights — an important consideration for an animal that, unlike many mammals, has a comparatively low and variable body temperature and limited insulating fur.
Predator Avoidance
A deep, multi-chambered burrow with several entrance and exit points offers better escape options than a shallow, single-entrance refuge. For a slow-moving animal whose primary defence is curling into an armoured ball rather than fleeing, having a secure, well-built retreat to reach before a predator closes the distance can be the difference between survival and predation, particularly from larger carnivores capable of exerting sustained pressure on a curled pangolin over time.
Do Pangolins Dig at All?
Ground pangolins are not incapable diggers, and burrow reuse does not mean they never excavate. Field observations show pangolins digging shallow, temporary scrapes for daytime refuge when no suitable existing burrow is available, and some individuals do construct more substantial dens, particularly females preparing to give birth, who appear to invest more heavily in a secure natal burrow. The pattern that emerges from tracking studies is one of flexibility: pangolins default to reusing available burrows — whether dug by aardvark, springhare, or occasionally another pangolin — when the option exists, and dig only when reuse is not practical.
What This Means for Habitat and Conservation Planning
This burrow-sharing relationship has a practical implication that is easy to overlook in pangolin conservation planning: protecting pangolin habitat is not just about protecting the pangolins themselves, or even just termite and ant availability, but also about maintaining healthy aardvark populations and the burrow infrastructure they create. A landscape that loses its aardvarks — whether through habitat fragmentation, road mortality, or prey base decline — loses a key source of ready-made pangolin shelter, potentially forcing pangolins into more energetically costly digging or less secure refuges.
This interdependence is one reason ecologists increasingly frame pangolin conservation within a broader ecosystem-health lens rather than treating the species in isolation. Camera trap and burrow-occupancy studies that log which species used a given burrow over time, rather than only tracking pangolins directly, have proven useful for building a fuller picture of how heavily ground pangolins in a given area rely on aardvark-dug shelter versus their own excavation.
Burrow Use at a Glance
| Burrow Source | Typical Use by Ground Pangolins |
|---|---|
| Aardvark burrows | Primary source of deep, long-term shelter in much of their range |
| Springhare burrows | Occasionally used, generally shallower and less preferred |
| Self-dug scrapes | Shallow, temporary daytime refuges when no burrow is available |
| Self-dug natal dens | More substantial excavation, mainly by breeding females |
FAQ: Pangolins and Aardvark Burrows
Do pangolins dig their own burrows?
Yes, but not as their default strategy. Ground pangolins are capable diggers and do excavate shallow refuges and, in some cases, natal dens, but field studies show they frequently occupy pre-existing burrows, especially those dug by aardvark, rather than always digging a full den from scratch.
Why do pangolins prefer aardvark burrows?
Aardvark burrows are deep, structurally stable, and require far less energy to occupy than to excavate. They provide stable underground temperatures, better predator escape options, and are often located in termite- and ant-rich habitat that suits pangolin foraging too.
Do pangolins and aardvarks ever meet in the same burrow?
Pangolins almost always use burrows after aardvarks have moved on rather than sharing them at the same time. Aardvarks dig extensive systems and frequently rotate between multiple burrows, leaving a steady supply of vacant shelters for pangolins and other species.
Conclusion
The image of the pangolin as a solitary excavator, single-handedly carving its home out of the earth, is only partly true. In practice, much of its shelter security depends on an animal it rarely, if ever, encounters directly: the aardvark. Recognising this quiet interspecies dependency is a reminder that protecting a single flagship species effectively often means protecting the wider web of burrowers, diggers, and habitat engineers it relies on — and that healthy pangolin populations may be as much a story about aardvarks as about pangolins themselves.