How long is a pangolin's tongue?

The tongue length depends on the species. Giant pangolins have tongues measuring approximately 70 centimetres, while white-bellied pangolins reach around 30 centimetres. Large species can extend their tongues up to 40 centimetres beyond the mouth. Unlike most mammals, the pangolin tongue does not attach to the hyoid bone in the throat. Instead, it extends back through the pharynx into the thoracic cavity and anchors to the xiphoid process at the base of the sternum.

Do pangolins have teeth?

No. All eight pangolin species are completely toothless, a condition called edentulism. The mandible is highly reduced to a thin, splint-like structure, and the zygomatic arch across the cheek is incomplete. Jaw muscles that would power chewing in other mammals are vestigial. Instead, pangolins process food using keratinised projections called pyloric teeth inside a muscular stomach region, combined with deliberately swallowed stones and grit that grind insects mechanically.

How do pangolins find ants and termites?

Pangolins rely primarily on their sense of smell. A 2020 controlled experiment published in Scientific Reports by DiPaola and colleagues at Hunter College tested Sunda pangolins with visual, acoustic, and olfactory cues. The pangolins located food using olfactory cues alone but failed with visual or acoustic cues. They followed scent trails along the ground to find prey, consistent with ground-level foraging along ant trails. Pangolins also possess a vomeronasal organ for detecting non-volatile chemical signals.

How many insects does a pangolin eat per day?

Estimates vary but a healthy adult pangolin may consume thousands of insects in a single night's foraging. In South Africa, research on Temminck's ground pangolins at Sabi Sand Wildtuin found that 99 percent of feeding bouts targeted subterranean prey, with each bout lasting approximately 40 seconds before the animal moved to a new nest. Pangolins are highly selective feeders and eat only a few preferred ant and termite species rather than consuming everything available.

What do pangolins eat in South Africa?

Temminck's ground pangolins, South Africa's only pangolin species, eat just four ant species and one termite species according to a 2016 Journal of Zoology study by Pietersen and colleagues. The preferred prey includes Anoplolepis steingroeveri, Camponotus fulvopilosus, two Crematogaster species, and the termite Trinervitermes trinervoides. This represents only 7.5 percent of available ant species in their habitat, making them among the most selective feeders of any mammal.

Species Biology 27 May 2026 8 min read

How Pangolins Eat: Tongue, Claws, and the Anatomy of an Ant-Eating Machine

Pangolins have no teeth. Their jaws are reduced to thin splints of bone. Their eyes are small and their vision poor. Yet these animals sustain body masses of up to 33 kilograms on a diet composed entirely of ants and termites, insects armoured in chitin and defended by biting mandibles, chemical sprays, and sheer numbers. The feeding system that makes this possible is one of the most specialised in the mammalian world: a tongue that can extend nearly the length of the animal's body, claws that crack open concrete-hard termite mounds, and a stomach that grinds food with keratinised teeth and swallowed stones.

A Tongue Anchored to the Chest

The pangolin tongue is unlike any other mammalian tongue. In most mammals, the tongue attaches to the hyoid bone in the throat. In pangolins, the tongue root bypasses the hyoid entirely, extending back through the pharynx into the thoracic cavity where it lies along the dorsal surface of the sternum. External muscles insert on the xiphoid process, the small cartilaginous projection at the base of the breastbone. The giant pangolin's tongue measures approximately 70 centimetres; the white-bellied pangolin reaches about 30 centimetres. Large species can extend the tongue up to 40 centimetres beyond the mouth, with a diameter of only half a centimetre.

A 2025 study in Integrative and Comparative Biology used DiceCT imaging on a white-bellied pangolin to reveal the mechanics. The tongue body contains paired parallel-fibered muscle bellies running two-thirds of its length, housed inside a glossal tube of helically wound fibres that drive protraction. Retraction is powered by muscles connecting the tongue to coiled xiphoid bones that may function as elastic springs. The conclusion: the pangolin tongue is a muscular hydrostat, the same functional category as an octopus arm or an elephant trunk, the first time this has been demonstrated in a mammalian tongue at near-body-length extension.

Sticky Saliva, No Teeth

The tongue is coated with viscous mucus produced by hypertrophied salivary glands located in the chest and throat. Insects adhere on contact and cannot escape. The pangolin flicks its tongue rapidly, dozens of times per minute during active feeding, each thrust capturing a fresh load of prey. The exact biochemical composition of the saliva remains incompletely characterised in the scientific literature, a genuine knowledge gap, though its adhesive function is well documented.

All eight pangolin species are completely edentulous. The mandible is V-shaped and highly reduced, one of the most gracile jaw structures in any mammal. The zygomatic arch, the bony bridge across the cheek that anchors chewing muscles in other species, is incomplete. The masseter and temporalis muscles that would power mastication are vestigial. A 2020 morphometric study by Ferreira-Cardoso and colleagues in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, examining 241 museum specimens across seven species, confirmed that pangolin skulls are structured entirely for tongue deployment rather than bite force.

Without teeth, food processing happens elsewhere.

A Stomach That Grinds

The pangolin stomach is functionally analogous to a bird's gizzard. Krause and Leeson described the anatomy in a 1974 Acta Anatomica paper: the pyloric region of the stomach features a mulberry-like bulge called the pyloric pillow, covered with yellowish keratinised projections referred to as pyloric teeth. These hard structures grind swallowed insects against deliberately ingested grit and small stones, called gastroliths, that accumulate in the pyloric chamber.

A digestive study at Taipei Zoo found the Chinese pangolin stomach C-shaped, weighing about 136 grams with a volume of 120 millilitres. Contents included stones mixed with digestive fluids. The consistent finding across species is the same: pangolins swallow insects whole, and the stomach does the mechanical work that teeth would perform in other mammals.

Claws Built for Breaking

Before the tongue can reach prey, the pangolin must breach the nest. Ant and termite colonies build structures that range from loose soil mounds to rock-hard constructions cemented with secretions and baked by the African sun. Pangolin forelimbs are engineered for this task.

A 2018 study by Steyn, Soley, and Crole at the University of Pretoria's Faculty of Veterinary Science at Onderstepoort described the thoracic limb osteology of Temminck's ground pangolin in The Anatomical Record. The scapula is broad and triangular. The humerus has a massive medial epicondyle. The radius and ulna are similarly sized with a large olecranon process, the bony lever that powers elbow extension. Three long, curved central claws dominate each forelimb, with two smaller claws on the outer digits. Every anatomical feature supports the same movements: protraction, retraction, powerful elbow extension, digit flexion, and forearm rotation.

The claws are so prominent that pangolins walk on the outer edges of their forefeet with the claws curled inward to protect them from wear. This distinctive gait, combined with the heavy tail used for balance, produces the characteristic rolling walk that gives pangolins their name, derived from the Malay word pengguling, meaning one who rolls up.

Finding Food in the Dark

Temminck's ground pangolins are primarily nocturnal during summer and increasingly diurnal in winter. In either case, they locate prey underground, where visibility is irrelevant. The question is: how does an animal with poor eyesight find specific ant species beneath the soil surface?

A 2020 Scientific Reports study by DiPaola and colleagues at Hunter College tested Sunda pangolins with visual, acoustic, and olfactory cues. The results were unambiguous: pangolins found food using olfactory cues alone and failed with visual or acoustic cues. A trail test confirmed they track scent paths along the ground but showed no evidence of detecting prey from airborne odour plumes at distance. They also possess a well-developed vomeronasal organ for detecting non-volatile chemical signals from ant trails. The feeding strategy is systematic: walk, smell, dig, feed, move on.

Selective Feeders, Not Indiscriminate Eaters

Despite having access to dozens of ant and termite species in their habitat, pangolins are remarkably selective. A 14-month radio-tracking study at Sabi Sand Wildtuin in South Africa by Swart, Richardson, and Ferguson, published in the Journal of Zoology in 1999, found that six prey species constituted 97 percent of the diet, with ants making up 96 percent. The most striking finding was that Anoplolepis custodiens appeared in 77 percent of diet samples while representing only 5 percent of available trapped ants.

Pietersen and colleagues at the University of Pretoria confirmed this selectivity in an arid-zone population. Their 2016 Journal of Zoology study recorded just four ant species and one termite species in the diet of Temminck's ground pangolins, representing 7.5 percent of available ant species and 25 percent of available termite species. Stable isotope analysis corroborated the direct observations.

Feeding bouts at individual nests are brief, averaging approximately 40 seconds, with 99 percent of bouts targeting subterranean prey. The pangolin extracts a portion of the colony and moves on, never destroying a nest entirely. This has led to descriptions of rotational foraging across the home range, though whether this constitutes intentional colony management or simply reflects the mechanics of satiation and movement has not been experimentally confirmed.

A 2025 Journal of Arid Environments study from Tswalu Kalahari Reserve found that pangolins and aardvarks sharing the same habitat partition prey seasonally, with dietary overlap lowest during scarcity when competition would be most damaging.

Convergence Without Common Ancestry

Pangolins are not the only mammals that eat ants and termites. Giant anteaters, aardvarks, aardwolves, armadillos, and echidnas all share this dietary niche. These species span five separate mammalian orders that diverged more than 100 million years ago. Yet they have independently evolved the same suite of adaptations: elongated tongues, enlarged salivary glands, powerful digging claws, reduced or absent teeth, and muscular stomachs.

The details differ. Anteater tongues anchor differently. Aardvark claws are spade-like rather than curved. But the functional outcomes converge. Delsuc and colleagues showed in a 2014 Molecular Ecology study that even gut microbiome composition converges across these lineages. What makes the pangolin's version unique is the sternal tongue anchor and coiled xiphoid spring mechanism. No other myrmecophage uses this system. Same problem, proprietary engineering.

What This Means for Conservation

Understanding feeding anatomy is not academic trivia. It has direct conservation implications. Pangolins in rehabilitation centres must be fed, and their extreme dietary selectivity means that offering the wrong ant species may be nutritionally inadequate. The gut microbiome that processes chitin is calibrated to specific prey, and artificial diets used in captive settings may not support the bacterial communities the animal depends on.

The brief feeding bouts documented in the wild mean that pangolins need access to multiple active ant and termite nests across a large area. Habitat fragmentation that reduces home range size or eliminates preferred prey species directly threatens feeding viability. Temminck's ground pangolins in the South African highveld and Kalahari maintain home ranges of 2 to 30 square kilometres precisely because no single location provides enough of the right food.

Every element of the pangolin's feeding system, from the spring-loaded tongue to the selective nose to the gizzard stomach, has been refined over 80 million years for a single purpose: extracting nutrition from armoured insects. It is a system of extraordinary precision. Protecting it means protecting the landscapes, the ant colonies, and the ecological relationships that keep it running.