How large is a pangolin's home range?

Home range size varies considerably between species, sexes, seasons, and habitat quality. For Temminck's ground pangolins in South Africa, GPS studies have documented home ranges from as small as 54 hectares for females in high-quality habitat to over 484 hectares for adult males during breeding season. Sunda pangolins in Borneo have been tracked with ranges of 50 to 150 hectares in plantation-forest mosaic landscapes. Smaller arboreal species like the white-bellied pangolin in Central Africa have estimated ranges of 10 to 50 hectares. In all species, males typically maintain larger ranges than females, especially during the dry season when mate-searching behaviour increases movement rates.

Do pangolins defend territories?

Pangolins are not territorial in the strict behavioural sense — they do not actively chase or fight intruders from a defined area with physical confrontation. However, they use scent marking extensively to communicate range occupancy, and home range overlaps between same-sex adults are typically small, suggesting some degree of spatial avoidance. Adult males in Temminck's ground pangolin studies show large home range overlaps with multiple females but minimal overlap with other males. This pattern — overlapping ranges between sexes, reduced overlap within sexes — is consistent with a resource-defence or female-defence mating system rather than strict territorial exclusion.

How far does a pangolin travel in one night?

GPS fix intervals from telemetry studies allow calculation of nightly displacement distances. Temminck's ground pangolins typically travel between 1 and 5 kilometres per night, with movement distances higher during the dry season and lower when prey density is locally concentrated. The longest single-night displacements recorded in published studies exceed 8 kilometres, though this is atypical. Sunda pangolins tracked in Borneo showed nightly displacements of 0.5 to 3 kilometres. Daily resting locations typically shift by 200 to 800 metres from the previous night's resting site, contributing to the gradual ranging pattern across the overall home range.

How do GPS collars affect pangolins?

GPS harnesses and collars used in pangolin studies are designed to fall off automatically after a set period using a rot-away or degradable link, minimising the time animals carry the device. Studies monitoring body condition of GPS-tracked Temminck's ground pangolins in South Africa have found no significant difference in body condition score or foraging success between tagged and untagged animals when harnesses are correctly fitted. However, pangolins are stress-sensitive, and the capture events required for fitting are managed under veterinary supervision with anaesthetic protocols to reduce stress injury risk. Animals showing signs of capture stress are monitored closely for at least 48 hours post-release.

What have GPS studies revealed about pangolin conservation needs?

Telemetry data have directly shaped conservation recommendations. The finding that adult male Temminck's ground pangolins use home ranges of 200-500 hectares has influenced minimum viable reserve size calculations — a protected area of several hundred hectares may support only one or two adult males. Movement data showing regular crossing of roads and fences has driven investment in wildlife road crossing infrastructure and electric fence modifications. Post-release tracking of rehabilitated animals has demonstrated which release sites produce the best long-term survival outcomes, enabling APWG to refine its release protocols. Range overlap data showing how male home ranges encompass multiple female ranges has informed breeding season management in conservation programmes.

Research Methods 11 June 2026 9 min read

Pangolin Home Range and Territory: What GPS Studies Have Revealed About How These Animals Use the Land

Before the development of lightweight GPS tracking technology, our understanding of pangolin movement was largely based on anecdote: a researcher's field observation, a footprint trail, the inference from burrow spacing. Pangolins were known to be wide-ranging — their foraging ecology, requiring them to find ant and termite colonies across a large landscape, demanded it — but the actual dimensions of their home ranges were unmeasured.

Over the past two decades, advances in GPS miniaturisation and battery life have transformed this picture. Studies conducted primarily in South Africa on Temminck's ground pangolins, and in smaller numbers on Sunda pangolins in Southeast Asia and white-bellied pangolins in Central Africa, have generated the first reliable data on how far pangolins travel, how they structure their space use, and what landscape features matter most to them. The results have been directly consequential for conservation planning.

Methods: From VHF to GPS

The shift from VHF (Very High Frequency) radio telemetry to GPS tracking represented a fundamental methodological change in movement ecology studies for secretive species. VHF tracking requires a researcher to be within receiving range of the animal's transmitter, take a directional bearing, and triangulate a location — a labour-intensive process that typically generated two to four locations per animal per day, and often fewer. For a nocturnal animal like a pangolin, this meant researchers were following signals through the bush at night, in terrain that pangolins navigate comfortably but humans do not.

GPS units record locations automatically at programmed intervals — every 15 minutes, every hour, or at any frequency the battery allows — and store or transmit the data remotely. This allows researchers to reconstruct movement paths with a resolution that was simply impossible with VHF methods. A GPS-tracked pangolin might generate 50 to 100 location points in a single night of activity, compared to the three or four that VHF tracking could achieve.

The challenge for pangolins was fitting GPS units small and light enough for an animal whose body weight typically ranges from 5 to 18 kilograms, and that wears a harness around a body designed to roll into a ball under threat — a configuration that puts unusual mechanical stress on harness attachment points. Wildlife engineers at organisations including the African Pangolin Working Group (APWG) and academic institutions have developed specialised harness designs tested iteratively over years of field deployment.

Temminck's Ground Pangolin: South African Findings

The Temminck's ground pangolin (Smutsia temminckii) has been the subject of more GPS telemetry research than any other pangolin species, primarily due to the concentration of researchers and rehabilitation programmes in South Africa. Published studies from the Limpopo, Mpumalanga, North West, and Gauteng provinces have generated a substantial dataset on home range size, movement rates, and habitat selection.

Home range estimates — typically calculated using kernel density estimation (KDE) or minimum convex polygon (MCP) methods on GPS location data — show considerable individual variation. Female Temminck's ground pangolins in quality habitat typically maintain ranges of 54 to 200 hectares. Males maintain larger ranges, from approximately 100 to over 484 hectares, with breeding season ranges at the upper end of this interval. Individual animals tracked across multiple years show high site fidelity — they use similar areas in successive years, with gradual range shifts rather than wholesale relocation.

Seasonal variation in range size is consistent across studies. Ranges expand during the dry season (April to October in South Africa), when prey availability is reduced and animals must travel further to meet daily energetic needs, and contract during the wet season when insects are more abundant and patchily distributed across a smaller foraging area.

Nightly displacement distances average 1 to 3 kilometres under normal conditions, with some individuals recording single-night straight-line displacements of 6 to 8 kilometres during breeding season male movement. These larger displacements likely represent directed mate-searching rather than normal foraging movement.

Overlapping Ranges and Social Organisation

One of the most practically important findings from GPS studies is the structure of home range overlaps between individuals. Male Temminck's ground pangolins maintain ranges that overlap extensively with those of multiple females — a pattern consistent with a polygynous or promiscuous mating system in which males range widely to locate receptive females. Male-to-male overlap, by contrast, is generally small, suggesting some degree of spatial avoidance between adult males, though not the aggressive territorial exclusion seen in highly territorial species.

Female home ranges show more stability and smaller size, likely reflecting the energetic demands of pregnancy and pup-rearing, which constrain how far a female can range without compromising her own condition. Post-partum tracking of females carrying pups shows reduced movement distances consistent with a cautious, energy-conservative foraging strategy during the early months of pup dependency.

Understanding range overlap structure has direct conservation implications. It suggests that maintaining a functional population — one with enough adults to support natural mating opportunities — requires a landscape large enough to accommodate the ranges of multiple females and at least one adult male. Simple minimum area calculations based on single animal range sizes underestimate the space requirements of a viable local population.

Roads, Fences, and Landscape Permeability

GPS tracking has documented how pangolins interact with the human-modified landscape features they encounter in their ranges. Road crossings are frequent: in areas where pangolin habitat includes roads, tracked animals cross regularly, typically during nocturnal activity peaks. This creates collision risk, and road mortality has been identified as a significant threat to Temminck's ground pangolins in South Africa, particularly on roads that cut through or adjacent to private game reserves and conservation areas.

Electric fences present a more complex barrier. Many private game reserves in South Africa use electrified perimeter fencing for game management, and these fences can physically exclude pangolins from portions of their range. The APWG and reserve managers have collaborated to develop pangolin-friendly fence modifications — typically involving the installation of a non-electrified bottom wire or a small ground-level gap that allows pangolins to pass beneath the electric strands. GPS tracking data has been directly used to identify fence sections that animals are attempting to cross, guiding the placement of modifications.

Habitat selection analyses from GPS data consistently show that Temminck's ground pangolins preferentially use areas with high termite mound density, deep soils suitable for burrowing, and access to rocky outcrops or dense vegetation for daytime resting. They avoid open cultivated areas and dense human settlement, though they do cross agricultural zones at night when connecting foraging patches.

Sunda Pangolin Studies in Southeast Asia

GPS studies on Sunda pangolins (Manis javanica) are fewer in number than Temminck's ground pangolin studies, partly due to the greater logistical challenge of working in Southeast Asian forest environments and partly due to the more severe threat level the species faces, which limits the availability of animals for non-invasive research. Published tracking studies from Borneo, Peninsular Malaysia, and Sumatra have produced home range estimates broadly consistent with the African data.

Sunda pangolins tracked in oil palm-forest mosaic landscapes in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, used home ranges of 50 to 150 hectares. Movement patterns showed active use of forest fragments and the edges of plantation blocks, with animals crossing open plantation ground to move between forest patches. This landscape use behaviour has important implications: it means Sunda pangolins can persist in fragmented landscapes if forest patch size and connectivity are maintained above certain thresholds, but it also exposes them to the roads, dogs, and human activity associated with plantation operations.

Vertical use of space — a dimension that ground-based GPS cannot easily capture — is more important for Sunda pangolins than for Temminck's ground pangolins. Sunda pangolins are competent climbers and frequently use tree hollows for daytime resting and may forage in trees at night. Studies using arboreal camera trap deployment have documented Sunda pangolins at heights of three to ten metres in logged forest.

Post-Release Tracking: Survival After Rehabilitation

One of the most directly applied uses of GPS tracking in pangolin conservation is post-release monitoring of rehabilitated animals — pangolins that have been rescued from trafficking, treated, and released back into the wild. The APWG runs the most systematic post-release tracking program for Temminck's ground pangolins globally, with hundreds of animals tagged and monitored following release at approved sites.

The tracking data have been analysed to compare survival rates across different release site characteristics, animal condition at release, and pre-release rehabilitation duration. Key findings include that animals released into sites with high natural prey density show higher short-term survival and better body condition maintenance than those released into lower-quality sites. Animals that spent longer in rehabilitation before release — allowing full physical recovery — showed better post-release ranging behaviour than animals released too early. And release during the wet season, when prey is more abundant, consistently produced better outcomes than dry season release.

This body of evidence has been used to refine the APWG's release protocols, making the return to the wild as successful as possible for each individual animal and contributing to the broader conservation of the Temminck's ground pangolin population in South Africa.

What the Data Means for Reserve and Corridor Planning

The home range data from GPS studies translate directly into recommendations for conservation area design. A reserve intended to support a viable Temminck's ground pangolin population — with multiple females and at least one adult male — needs to contain enough core habitat for three to five adult home ranges, implying a minimum of 1,500 to 3,000 hectares of suitable habitat. Reserves substantially smaller than this can support transient individuals but are unlikely to maintain breeding populations over time.

Habitat corridor planning has been similarly informed by movement data. Pangolins are documented crossing agricultural land and modified terrain to move between habitat patches, but such crossings are costly in terms of exposure risk. Corridors that maintain at least some vegetative cover and reduce road crossing frequency along preferred movement routes dramatically increase the probability of successful connectivity between populations. GPS data identifying where individual pangolins are attempting to move through the landscape provides the spatial foundation for corridor placement decisions that are grounded in actual animal behaviour rather than theoretical ecological inference.

In a species where each individual represents significant conservation value — Temminck's ground pangolins sell for tens of thousands of dollars on the illegal market, reflecting scarcity as much as demand — the ability to understand and predict their landscape use is not merely academic. It is the difference between conservation strategies that work and those that do not.