Pangolin Diet and Nutrition: What Pangolins Eat
Pangolins are among the most dietary-specialised mammals on Earth. While many animals have broad or flexible diets, pangolins are obligate myrmecophages: they eat almost exclusively ants and termites. This extreme dietary specialisation has shaped nearly every aspect of their anatomy, from their toothless jaws and highly muscular gizzard-like stomachs to their extraordinarily long tongues and powerful digging claws. Understanding what pangolins eat, and how they process that food, is essential to understanding the animals themselves.
The Core Diet: Ants and Termites
All eight species of pangolin feed primarily on ants and termites. The precise mix of prey species varies considerably between pangolin species, between populations of the same species, and even within the same individual's diet across seasons. Some pangolins show a strong preference for termites, while others consume ants in much greater quantities. Several studies have found that the diet shifts depending on the relative availability of prey, with pangolins being opportunistic within the constraint of eating only social insects.
African ground pangolins (Smutsia temminckii) have been documented feeding primarily on ants of the genus Anoplolepis and on termites from the family Termitidae. In South Africa, studies using DNA metabarcoding of faecal samples have identified dozens of distinct ant and termite species in the diet of individual ground pangolins, suggesting that they are less rigidly selective at the species level than once thought. They target colonies based on location, accessibility, and apparent size rather than a fixed preference for particular taxa.
Asian pangolin species show similar patterns. The Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) has been found to consume a wide range of ant and termite genera, with the composition varying between forest, grassland, and agricultural habitats. The Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) of Southeast Asia shows a notable preference for termites, particularly the large mound-building species common in lowland tropical forests, though ants also form a significant part of its diet.
Foraging Strategy and Food Location
Olfaction as the Primary Sense
Pangolins locate ant and termite colonies almost entirely through their sense of smell. Their eyesight is poor and plays little role in finding food. The olfactory system is highly developed, with a large nasal cavity and extensive olfactory epithelium. Pangolins will pause frequently while moving, lowering their snout to the ground or pressing it against the bark of trees to detect the chemical signatures of insect colonies hidden beneath the surface or inside wood.
The ability to detect active and productive colonies at a distance allows pangolins to be highly efficient foragers. Rather than digging randomly, they target colonies that are likely to yield a substantial meal, minimising the energy expenditure on digging and maximising the insects obtained per unit of foraging effort. This efficiency is important given that ants and termites, while abundant, are individually small, and a large number must be consumed at each feeding bout.
Excavation and Tongue Feeding
Once a colony is located, the pangolin uses its robust front claws to break into the nest structure. The forelimbs are exceptionally powerful relative to body size, capable of breaking apart compacted soil, rotting wood, and even hardened termite mounds that resist similar effort by much larger animals. The hind limbs and tail are used to brace against the substrate during excavation, allowing the forelimbs to generate considerable force.
With access to the nest galleries open, the pangolin inserts its tongue, which is coated in thick, sticky saliva. The tongue can extend to a length of up to 40 centimetres in larger species, allowing it to reach deep into galleries that the pangolin itself cannot enter. Insects adhering to the saliva are withdrawn and swallowed. The tongue moves extremely rapidly, completing multiple extension-and-retraction cycles per second at peak foraging speed.
The pangolin's eyes and nostrils close during feeding, and the ears flatten against the head, protecting these openings from the stings and bites of defensive insects. The thick scales covering the body provide additional protection, as worker ants and soldier termites that attempt to bite or spray acid at the intruder are largely ineffective against the armour.
Digestive Anatomy
No Teeth
Pangolins are toothless. Unlike most other insectivorous mammals, which have reduced but functional teeth, pangolins have completely lost their dentition through evolution. This is not a disadvantage for their particular diet: ants and termites are soft-bodied enough that chewing is unnecessary, and the absence of teeth simplifies the skull structure, allowing for a more elongated and narrow snout that facilitates entry into insect galleries.
The Muscular Stomach
Because pangolins cannot chew, the mechanical breakdown of food occurs in the stomach. Pangolins have evolved a stomach with a thick, muscular wall in the pyloric region, functionally analogous to a bird's gizzard. When pangolins swallow, they often ingest small stones along with their insect prey. These stones are retained in the muscular section of the stomach and act as a grinding medium, crushing the exoskeletons of ants and termites to release the nutritional contents.
This gizzard-like mechanism is highly effective and appears to compensate fully for the lack of teeth. Studies of digestive efficiency in captive pangolins suggest that they extract a high proportion of the available nutrients from their insect prey despite the absence of any pre-gastric mechanical processing. The combination of gastric acid and physical grinding breaks down chitin, the structural polymer that makes up insect exoskeletons, sufficiently for absorption in the intestine.
Nutritional Requirements
Ants and termites are nutritionally rich foods when consumed in quantity. They provide high-quality protein, a range of amino acids, moderate fat content (particularly from reproductives and larvae), and various micronutrients including zinc, iron, and B vitamins. Termite queens and alate reproductives, which pangolins consume opportunistically when encountered, are especially energy-dense due to their large fat reserves.
Pangolins also benefit from the carbohydrates stored in fungal gardens within some termite mounds, which they consume along with the insects themselves. The nutritional profile of a pangolin's diet is thus somewhat more varied than the simple description of "ants and termites" might suggest, as the exact composition of a colony varies with the castes and life stages present.
Daily Food Intake
Estimates of daily food intake vary by species and body size, but studies of captive and free-ranging individuals suggest that adult pangolins consume between 140 and 400 grams of insects per night. Larger species such as the giant pangolin (Smutsia gigantea) are at the upper end of this range, while smaller species such as the long-tailed pangolin (Phataginus tetradactyla) consume much less. Relative to body weight, the consumption rate is fairly consistent across species, typically in the range of 5 to 10 percent of body mass per day.
A single foraging bout can visit multiple colonies in a single night. Ground pangolins in southern Africa have been tracked travelling two to five kilometres per night during foraging, visiting numerous termite and ant colonies along the route. The animal does not exhaust a colony in a single visit but instead takes a portion of the colony's population and moves on, allowing the colony to recover before a return visit days or weeks later. This rotational foraging strategy is highly sustainable and reflects a long coevolutionary relationship between pangolins and the colonies they exploit.
Seasonal and Habitat-Driven Variation
The composition of the diet shifts with the seasons. During wetter months, when ant and termite colonies are more active and reproductives are more often encountered at the surface, pangolins have access to a more varied and energy-dense selection. During dry seasons, when surface insect activity is reduced, pangolins rely more on species that maintain active underground colonies, and their foraging ranges may expand to compensate for reduced prey density.
Habitat quality has a direct effect on diet quality. In intact native forest, the diversity and density of ant and termite species is high, offering pangolins a broad selection of prey. In degraded or transformed habitats, the insect community simplifies, reducing dietary diversity and potentially limiting access to certain nutritionally important prey types. This is one reason why habitat loss reduces pangolin fitness even in areas where direct persecution is absent.
Challenges for Captive Nutrition
The dietary specialisation of pangolins is one of the primary reasons they are so difficult to maintain in captivity. Providing sufficient quantities of live ants and termites is logistically demanding and expensive, and most captive facilities have historically struggled to meet pangolins' nutritional requirements over the long term. Many captive pangolins developed nutritional deficiencies and gastrointestinal problems, contributing to high mortality rates in zoo collections.
In recent years, specialist institutions have made significant progress in developing substitute diets that replicate the nutritional profile of live insects without requiring their continuous provision. These formulated diets typically include ground insects, insect meal, egg, various protein sources, and carefully balanced mineral and vitamin supplements. When combined with a proportion of live insects, these diets have supported longer-term survival in captive pangolins, though they remain imperfect substitutes for the natural diet.
Conclusion
The pangolin's diet is simultaneously its greatest strength and its greatest vulnerability. The specialisation on ants and termites has made the pangolin superbly effective at exploiting a food source that is extraordinarily abundant across tropical and subtropical ecosystems. It has also shaped every aspect of the animal's anatomy and behaviour in fascinating ways. But that same specialisation makes pangolins sensitive to habitat changes that alter insect communities, and it makes them profoundly challenging to care for outside their natural environment. Protecting pangolins ultimately means protecting the ant- and termite-rich habitats they depend on, and ensuring that the ecological relationships sustaining those habitats remain intact.