Pangolin Diet and Nutrition: What Pangolins Eat and Why It Matters
Of all the adaptations that make pangolins remarkable, none is more central to their biology — or more consequential for their survival — than their diet. Pangolins eat ants and termites. Only ants and termites. This extreme dietary specialisation has shaped virtually every aspect of their anatomy, from their toothless jaws to their extraordinarily long tongues and their powerful, clawed forelimbs. It has also made pangolins one of the most difficult animals in the world to keep alive in captivity.
Understanding what pangolins eat, how they find and consume their food, and what nutrients they extract from it is not just a matter of biological curiosity. It sits at the heart of why pangolins are so hard to conserve, why captive programs so frequently fail, and why protecting the ecosystems pangolins depend on is just as important as tackling poaching directly.
What Is a Myrmecophage?
A myrmecophage is an animal that specialises in eating ants (from the Greek myrmex, meaning ant). More broadly, the term is applied to animals that consume ants and termites as their primary or exclusive food source. Pangolins are among the most committed myrmecophages on Earth, alongside aardvarks, anteaters, and numbats.
Unlike some of these relatives, which may supplement their diet with other food sources, pangolins in the wild show almost no documented consumption of anything other than ants and termites. Occasional reports of pangolins consuming beetle larvae or other soft-bodied insects have been noted, but these appear to be incidental ingestion during foraging rather than deliberate dietary choices. The pangolin's entire biology is optimised for a single food type — a degree of specialisation that is both extraordinary and ecologically precarious.
Primary Prey: Ants and Termites
Not all ants and termites are equally acceptable to pangolins. Studies of wild pangolins — conducted primarily through stomach content analysis and observation of foraging sites — reveal a strong preference for specific species and life stages of their prey.
Preferred Ant Species
African pangolins show strong preferences for ground-nesting ant species, particularly within the genera Anoplolepis, Camponotus (carpenter ants), and Crematogaster. Ground pangolins (Smutsia temminckii) in southern Africa have been recorded exploiting colonies of the common pugnacious ant (Anoplolepis custodiens) — a highly aggressive species that most predators avoid — suggesting that the pangolin's thick scales and the chemical composition of its skin provide protection against the bites and formic acid sprays of defensive ant colonies.
Asian pangolins, including the Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) and the Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla), similarly target ground-nesting and arboreal ant species, adjusting their foraging strategy based on habitat and season. Tree-climbing pangolins such as the white-bellied pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis) of Central Africa exploit ant colonies in dead wood and tree bark, using their prehensile tails to hang while feeding.
Termite Consumption
Termites represent the second major component of the pangolin diet, and in some habitats and seasons, they may actually constitute the majority of food intake. Termite mounds — particularly those of the genera Macrotermes and Trinervitermes in Africa — are high-value food sources that pangolins will return to repeatedly over weeks or months, excavating fresh galleries with each visit while allowing mounds to recover between foraging bouts.
Pangolins appear to prefer the soft-bodied workers and larvae within colonies over the harder-shelled soldiers, likely for ease of digestion. The nutritional density of termite reproductives (alates) during swarming season makes these a particularly rich food source, and pangolin foraging activity has been observed to spike during swarming events.
Foraging Behaviour: Nose to Ground
A pangolin foraging for food is a study in focused, methodical searching. The animal moves slowly across the landscape with its nose close to the ground, relying almost entirely on its acute sense of smell to detect chemical signals from ant and termite colonies beneath the soil surface. Pangolins have poor eyesight and are functionally colour-blind; scent is their primary sensory tool.
The Role of the Tongue
Once a colony is located, the pangolin uses its powerful front claws — which may be 4 to 6 centimetres long in large species — to tear open the outer structure of a mound, rotting log, or soil chamber. It then inserts its tongue into the exposed galleries. The pangolin tongue is anatomically extraordinary: it can extend 25 to 27 centimetres beyond the tip of the snout (longer than the animal's own head), is coated in thick, viscous saliva, and is anchored not in the throat but in the pelvis — a unique feature among mammals that allows the tongue's extraordinary length.
Each insertion and withdrawal of the tongue captures hundreds of insects. Pangolins have no teeth; they cannot chew. Instead, food passes to a muscular, keratinised stomach that grinds insects using small stones the pangolin deliberately swallows — functioning much like the gizzard of a bird. Pangolins can close their nostrils and ears with specialised muscles to keep insects out while feeding.
Foraging Range and Duration
A single pangolin may travel between 2 and 10 kilometres in a night of foraging, visiting multiple colonies across its home range. Foraging bouts typically last between 3 and 7 hours. Radio-tracking studies of ground pangolins in South Africa's North West Province found that individuals rotated through a predictable set of foraging sites, revisiting each after intervals of 5 to 14 days — suggesting active management of prey colony recovery.
Daily Intake: Up to 70 Million Insects Per Year
The sheer volume of insects a pangolin consumes is staggering. Studies of ground pangolins in southern Africa estimate that an adult individual consumes between 140 and 200 grams of insects per kilogram of body weight per day. For a medium-sized pangolin weighing 5 kilograms, this represents roughly 700 to 1,000 grams of insects daily — corresponding to tens of thousands of individual ants and termites per night.
Scaled to an annual figure, a single pangolin may consume approximately 70 million insects per year. This makes pangolins extraordinarily important pest controllers in their ecosystems. In savanna and bushveld environments across sub-Saharan Africa, pangolins help regulate termite populations that would otherwise damage soil structure, vegetation, and agricultural land. The loss of pangolins from an ecosystem has measurable consequences for termite abundance and the health of the soils they inhabit.
Nutritional Breakdown: What Insects Provide
Ants and termites are nutritionally rich, and pangolins have evolved to extract maximum value from this diet. Workers and larvae of common prey species contain:
- Protein: 40 to 60% of dry weight — essential for muscle maintenance, immune function, and milk production in lactating females.
- Fat: 15 to 30% of dry weight, particularly in larvae and reproductives — provides metabolic energy and fat-soluble vitamins.
- Chitin: The structural carbohydrate forming insect exoskeletons — provides dietary fibre and may support gut microbiome function.
- Minerals: Calcium, phosphorus, zinc, and iron — often at higher concentrations in insects than in vertebrate muscle tissue.
The balance of protein and fat in wild insect prey varies by species, colony composition, and season. Reproductives (queens and alates) are particularly fat-rich, providing concentrated energy at key times of year. This nutritional variability is one reason why replicating the pangolin diet in captivity is so difficult — a fixed substitute diet cannot match the nutritional diversity that wild pangolins achieve through selective foraging.
Seasonal Variation in Diet
Pangolin diets are not static across seasons. In environments with pronounced wet and dry seasons — as found across much of sub-Saharan Africa — ant and termite activity fluctuates significantly. During the dry season, termite mounds become harder and more difficult to excavate, and surface foraging becomes less productive. Pangolins respond by shifting their foraging effort, spending more time at previously established mound sites and potentially extending their nightly travel distances.
During the wet season, when termite alates swarm and new ant colonies proliferate, foraging conditions improve dramatically. Radio-tracking data from Zimbabwe and South Africa show that pangolins gain weight more rapidly during the wet season and may enter the dry season with sufficient fat reserves to buffer lean periods. In habitats where seasonal food availability is severely disrupted by drought or land degradation, pangolins may face nutritional stress that reduces reproductive output and increases vulnerability to disease.
Captivity Diet Challenges: Why Specialist Diet Equals High Mortality
The pangolin's dietary specialisation is the primary reason that captive survival rates remain so catastrophically low. Facilities attempting to maintain pangolins face a fundamental problem: sourcing large quantities of live, fresh ants and termites on a daily basis is logistically demanding, expensive, and highly variable in quality.
Substitute Diets and Their Failures
Numerous formulated diets have been trialled in zoological and research facilities over the past four decades. These have included insect-based pastes, mealworm-based preparations, commercial ant egg supplements, and protein-enriched gruels. The results have been consistently poor. Animals maintained on substitute diets typically show initial weight maintenance followed by progressive decline — characterised by muscle wasting, diarrhoea, immune dysfunction, and eventually organ failure. Post-mortem analyses frequently reveal hepatic lipidosis (fatty liver disease), metabolic bone disease, and gastrointestinal pathology consistent with nutritional deficiency.
The problem is not simply one of protein or fat content. Pangolins appear to require specific compounds — possibly including particular fatty acids, trace minerals, or bioactive molecules — that are present in live ant and termite prey but absent or degraded in processed alternatives. Identifying these compounds and replicating them in a manufactured diet remains an unsolved research challenge.
Progress in Specialist Facilities
A small number of facilities have achieved significantly better outcomes by committing to live insect feeding. In Taiwan, the Taipei Zoo's pangolin program — one of the most advanced in the world — has used live ant colonies cultured on-site, combined with detailed monitoring of animal condition, to achieve survival times of several years for some individuals. Similar approaches have been pioneered by rehabilitation specialists in South Africa who release pangolins back to the wild after ensuring they can forage independently. These programs demonstrate that improved outcomes are possible, but they require levels of resource investment that most facilities cannot sustain.
The Gut Microbiome's Role
Emerging research has highlighted the gut microbiome as a critical and underappreciated factor in pangolin nutrition. Like all mammals, pangolins host communities of bacteria, archaea, and fungi in their digestive tracts that aid in nutrient extraction, immune modulation, and protection against pathogens. Studies of wild pangolin gut microbiomes reveal diverse bacterial communities adapted to processing chitin and the formic acid compounds found in ant prey.
When pangolins are removed from the wild and placed in captivity, this microbiome is disrupted rapidly — by dietary change, antibiotic treatment, and stress-induced physiological changes. Loss of key microbial taxa may impair the animal's ability to extract nutrients even from appropriate food sources, creating a downward spiral in which nutritional deficiency and microbiome disruption reinforce each other. Restoring gut microbiome health through probiotic supplementation and dietary diversity is an active area of research in specialist pangolin care.
"You cannot separate pangolin nutrition from pangolin ecology. The diet that sustains them is embedded in the living forest, and no factory can fully replicate it." — Pangolin specialist, African Pangolin Working Group
Why Diet Matters for Conservation
The pangolin's dietary biology has consequences that extend well beyond individual animal care. It shapes where pangolins can live, how large their populations can grow, and how resilient they are to habitat change. It determines the viability of captive breeding — currently close to zero — and therefore the degree to which any ex-situ safety net is possible. And it underlines the fundamental importance of protecting intact ecosystems rather than just the pangolins within them.
A pangolin without a functioning forest — with diverse, abundant ant and termite colonies — is a pangolin that cannot survive. Protecting pangolins therefore means protecting the soil, the vegetation structure, and the insect communities that sustain them. In southern Africa, this means resisting the conversion of savanna to monoculture agriculture. In Southeast Asia, it means halting deforestation in the lowland tropical forests that pangolins depend on. In the Philippines, it means securing the remaining forests of Palawan from encroachment and degradation.
Diet, then, is not simply a biological footnote in the pangolin story. It is central to understanding what pangolins need, why they are so difficult to save once removed from the wild, and why the most effective conservation strategy remains keeping them — and their insect-rich habitats — intact in the first place.