What Do Ground Pangolins Eat in South Africa?

The ground pangolin (Smutsia temminckii) is one of the most recognizable and least understood mammals in southern Africa. Armoured in overlapping keratin scales and built for a solitary, nocturnal life, this species has evolved over millions of years into a highly specialized predator of social insects. Its entire anatomy — from its toothless jaw to its muscular, scale-covered tail — reflects a single dietary commitment: eating ants and termites, and nothing else.

Understanding what ground pangolins eat is not just a matter of natural history curiosity. It sits at the heart of why these animals are so difficult to keep alive in captivity, why habitat loss threatens them so profoundly, and why their continued survival is tied inseparably to the health of South Africa's savanna ecosystems.

A Strictly Insectivorous Diet

Ground pangolins are obligate myrmecophages — animals that feed exclusively on ants and termites. Unlike many omnivores that shift opportunistically between food sources, pangolins have no dietary fallback. There is no fruit, no seed, no vertebrate prey, no carrion. Every calorie comes from the colonies of social insects that inhabit the soils and mounds of the bushveld, dry savanna, and thornveld habitats across southern Africa.

Within that narrow category, ground pangolins in South Africa are selective. They do not consume every ant or termite species indiscriminately. Research conducted in and around the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve and Limpopo's lowveld regions has shown strong preferences for particular genera, and those preferences shift with season and availability.

Preferred Ant Species

Among ants, ground pangolins show a marked preference for subterranean and ground-nesting species. Key genera consumed include:

• Anoplolepis spp. — the common pugnacious ants of southern Africa, abundant in disturbed and open habitats
• Camponotus spp. — large carpenter ants that nest in soil or dead wood and are encountered year-round
• Cataglyphis and related genera in arid zones
• Lepisiota spp. — small, fast-moving ants common in grassland soils

Pangolins typically avoid aggressive species with significant formic acid defences, though their thick eyelids, closeable nostrils, and muscular stomach lining give them considerable protection against chemical and physical attack.

Preferred Termite Species

Termites constitute a substantial — and seasonally dominant — portion of the ground pangolin's diet. Favoured genera include:

• Trinervitermes spp. — harvester termites that build the low, domed mounds common across South African grasslands
• Microhodotermes spp. — surface-foraging species encountered in drier western habitats
• Macrotermes spp. — large mound-building termites whose towering structures are a landmark feature of Limpopo and Mpumalanga bushveld
• Odontotermes spp. — fungus-growing termites common in moister savanna

The larvae and eggs within termite colonies are especially energy-rich, and pangolins will deliberately excavate into mound galleries to access brood chambers rather than feeding only on adult workers at the surface.

How Ground Pangolins Find Their Food

The ground pangolin has no teeth. None. The jaw is a slender, toothless structure, and chewing is physically impossible. Instead, the pangolin relies entirely on a tongue that, when fully extended, can reach 25 to 40 centimetres beyond the tip of the snout — longer than the animal's own head. This tongue is coated in thick, viscous saliva that traps insects on contact. Prey is swallowed whole, and a muscular, keratinized gizzard — often containing swallowed sand or small stones — does the mechanical work of grinding food.

Locating prey underground is achieved primarily through olfaction. The ground pangolin's sense of smell is acute, and the animal moves with its nose low to the ground, sweeping methodically across the soil surface. It can detect active ant trails and termite workings beneath several centimetres of compacted earth. Once a productive site is located, the animal uses its powerful, curved foreclaws — the same claws that make its tracks unmistakable in soft sand — to excavate rapidly, often breaking into termite galleries within seconds.

Hearing also plays a role. Pangolins are thought to detect the vibrations of termite activity through the soil, though this is less well documented than their reliance on smell.

Foraging Behavior and Nightly Range

Ground pangolins are nocturnal and solitary. Foraging begins after dark and continues through much of the night, typically ending before dawn. Individuals in well-studied populations in the Limpopo and North West provinces have been recorded travelling between two and five kilometres per night, though particularly productive foraging grounds can result in much shorter circuits if insect density is high.

A single pangolin will visit dozens of ant or termite sites in a night, spending only a minute or two at each before moving on. This rapid, rotational approach is ecologically significant: it prevents a single colony from being depleted entirely, allows ant and termite populations to recover, and keeps the pangolin moving through enough territory to meet its caloric requirements without exhausting local resources.

Estimates of food intake vary, but well-monitored individuals are believed to consume between 140 and 200 grams of insects per night — which, given the small body mass of individual ants and termites, represents tens of thousands of insects in a single foraging session.

Seasonal Variation in Diet

South Africa's savanna habitats undergo pronounced wet and dry seasons, and insect availability shifts accordingly. During the summer wet season (October through March), termites swarm and surface foraging opportunities increase dramatically. Alate termites — the winged reproductive forms released in mass nuptial flights after the first rains — represent a brief but highly accessible food bonanza, and pangolins opportunistically exploit these events.

During the dry winter months, termite activity retreats deeper underground. Surface foraging becomes less productive, and pangolins shift their attention more heavily toward ants, particularly species that remain active at depth. In the Kalahari fringe and semi-arid zones, this seasonal shift is especially pronounced, and individuals in these habitats have larger home ranges than those in moister savanna, a reflection of the lower and more dispersed food density.

Winter is also the period when pangolins rely more on stored fat reserves. Adults in good condition entering winter carry fat deposits that buffer them against nights when foraging yields are low. This seasonal fat cycling is one reason body condition at the end of summer is a meaningful indicator of an individual's long-term survival prospects.

Why This Diet Makes Captivity So Difficult

The ground pangolin's dietary specialization is the central reason its captive survival rate has historically been catastrophic. Pangolins cannot be sustained on generic insectivore diets. They have not evolved the metabolic pathways to extract adequate nutrition from mealworms, crickets, or processed insect pastes, and the absence of the specific chemical compounds found in their natural prey — combined with the psychological stress of captivity — typically leads to gut dysfunction, immune collapse, and death within weeks or months.

Successful long-term care requires live colonies of preferred ant and termite species, often numbering in the millions to sustain even a single animal. The logistics of maintaining such colonies, combined with the territorial and behavioural needs of wild-caught individuals, mean that rescue and rehabilitation — rather than permanent captive housing — remains the only viable model for injured or confiscated animals. Organizations working in South Africa have developed protocols involving semi-wild enclosures with living insect populations, but even these require extraordinary resources and expertise.

This is one of the most urgent arguments for protecting wild habitat: a pangolin in its native bushveld is, from a dietary standpoint, nearly impossible to replicate elsewhere.

Role in the Ecosystem

The ground pangolin's consumption of ants and termites at scale makes it a meaningful regulator of social insect populations. In South African savannas, termites play a central role in soil turnover, decomposition, and nutrient cycling, but unchecked termite populations can significantly affect vegetation. Pangolins, along with aardvarks and aardwolves, function as natural population controls, keeping termite colonies at densities the ecosystem can absorb.

Pangolin excavations also contribute to soil aeration. The burrows and openings left after foraging create microhabitats used by lizards, insects, and small mammals. In this sense, the ground pangolin is not only a consumer within its ecosystem but an architect of it — a keystone species whose presence shapes the physical structure of the environment it inhabits.

Protecting the ground pangolin means protecting the full ecological web that supports it: the termite mounds of Limpopo, the ant colonies of the Kalahari, the undisturbed savanna soils that make foraging possible. Diet is not a peripheral detail in pangolin conservation. It is the thread that holds everything else together.