How does a pangolin find insects underground?

Pangolins locate ant and termite colonies primarily through their extraordinary sense of smell. Their olfactory system can detect the chemical signatures — pheromones and volatile compounds — emitted by insect colonies through soil, wood, and leaf litter. A pangolin foraging at night will methodically scan the ground, pausing and sniffing intensely at points of high odour concentration before committing to excavation. Research on Temminck's ground pangolins in South Africa suggests they can detect active termite mounds from distances of several metres and can distinguish active from inactive nests without digging, saving significant energy.

How long is a pangolin's tongue?

A pangolin's tongue can reach 40 centimetres in length in large individuals — often longer than the animal's entire head and body in smaller species. When not in use, the tongue retracts into a sheath that extends beyond the throat and into the chest cavity, anchoring near the pelvis in some species. The tongue is covered in highly viscous, sticky mucus that allows insects to adhere on contact. A foraging pangolin can complete up to 150 tongue insertions per minute into an ant or termite gallery, extracting hundreds of insects with each withdrawal.

Do pangolins have good eyesight?

Pangolin eyesight is limited compared to their other senses. As primarily nocturnal mammals, they possess a tapetum lucidum — a reflective layer behind the retina that amplifies available light — giving their eyes a characteristic eye-shine when caught in torchlight at night. However, their visual acuity for fine detail and colour discrimination is poor. Pangolins appear to rely on vision mainly to detect large-scale movement and orient in their environment, while smell and touch do the fine-scale work of locating food and navigating terrain. Their small, deeply set eyes are also protected by thick lids that close automatically when the animal is foraging near aggressive ant or termite species.

How do pangolins communicate with each other?

Pangolins are largely solitary and not vocal communicators, but they maintain a rich chemical communication system through scent marking. All pangolin species possess paired anal scent glands that produce a strong-smelling secretion used to mark territory, signal reproductive status, and identify individuals. Males typically scent-mark more frequently than females and use urine deposition in combination with gland secretions. Pangolins also possess small glands on their scales and feet that may contribute to scent trails as they move through their home range. Encounters between individuals outside the breeding season are rare and typically brief.

Why do pangolins close their eyes and nostrils while feeding?

Pangolins evolved remarkable protective adaptations for feeding inside ant and termite mounds, where defensive soldier insects attack aggressively. Their thick eyelids close tightly during feeding, protecting the eyes from bites and sprayed formic acid. The nostrils seal shut through muscular contraction, preventing insects from entering the nasal passages. The ear canals are similarly protected — some species have muscular closures that reduce the ear opening during active excavation. Despite having no teeth and apparently defenceless tongues, pangolins can feed inside colonies of aggressive ant species that would drive off most other predators, protected entirely by their physical armour and sealed sense organs.

Species Biology 11 June 2026 8 min read

Pangolin Sensory Biology: How the World's Most Trafficked Mammal Smells, Hears, and Navigates the Night

A Temminck's ground pangolin moving through the South African bushveld at two in the morning looks, to the untrained eye, like a creature operating almost blind. Its small eyes barely catch the moonlight. It moves with deliberate slowness, pausing repeatedly, nose low to the earth. It does not appear to be detecting anything. Then it stops at a patch of bare ground indistinguishable from the surrounding soil, begins excavating with curved foreclaws, and within minutes is feeding from an active termite mound it somehow located from a metre away, in the dark, with nothing visible to a human observer.

That apparent miracle is the pangolin's sensory system at work. These animals have evolved a remarkable suite of sensory adaptations shaped entirely by a single ecological challenge: finding and eating insects that live hidden inside soil and wood, while navigating complex terrain in darkness and protecting themselves from every ant and termite bite the process involves.

The Dominant Sense: Olfaction

Smell is unambiguously the primary sense in pangolins. Their olfactory anatomy reflects this: a long, tapered snout housing an olfactory epithelium that occupies a proportionally large volume of the nasal cavity. The chemical signals emitted by ant and termite colonies — pheromones, trail chemicals, alarm compounds, the volatile fatty acids of colony metabolism — are detectable to pangolins through soil, wood, leaf litter, and even concrete in some suburban environments where pangolins occasionally forage.

Research on Temminck's ground pangolins tracked with GPS collars in South Africa has documented the foraging process in some detail. Animals consistently pause and orient at specific points before digging, suggesting active olfactory assessment rather than random excavation. They appear able to distinguish between active and inactive ant and termite mounds without digging — an energy-saving capability of considerable importance given that excavating a dense clay mound requires significant physical effort. Field observations suggest pangolins can detect colony presence from distances of several metres under favourable wind conditions.

The olfactory acuity extends beyond prey detection. Pangolins use scent to navigate their home ranges, identify individuals, assess reproductive status, and mark territorial boundaries. Adult male Temminck's pangolins maintain home ranges of several hundred hectares, and chemical signposting through scent marks at prominent landscape features — large trees, rocky outcrops, termite mound bases — appears to be the primary mechanism for range maintenance.

Scent Glands and Chemical Communication

All pangolin species possess paired anal scent glands capable of producing a pungent secretion. The scent is broadly analogous to that of a skunk, though typically less intense: a combination of sulphurous and musky compounds with strong individual and species-specific variation. Both male and female pangolins use these glands for scent marking, but males are observed marking more frequently, particularly during the dry season when home range overlaps between individuals increase.

The secretion serves multiple communication functions. At a population level, it conveys identity — allowing an individual to recognise whether a scent mark was left by a known neighbour or a stranger. At a reproductive level, females appear to broadcast hormonal information through their scent in the days around oestrus, with males in the area showing increased ranging behaviour and marking frequency in response.

Pangolins also possess small secretory structures associated with their scales and the skin between them, and the bottoms of their feet contain glands that may leave chemical traces as they walk. The full picture of pangolin chemical communication is still being assembled from field and captive observations, but it is clear that in a largely solitary, nocturnal animal, scent carries much of the communicative load that vocal or visual signals carry in more social species.

Hearing: Functional but Limited

Pangolin ears are small and positioned low on the head. Unlike cats or rabbits, pangolins cannot rotate their ear pinnae to direct sound — the external ear is a relatively simple, fixed structure. Their hearing range covers the frequencies most relevant to their ecology: low-frequency ground vibrations transmitted through the soil, and mid-range airborne sounds used for general environmental awareness.

Whether pangolins use sound to locate prey is not fully established. Some researchers have proposed that the low-frequency vibrations produced by large termite colonies — the collective sound of millions of insects moving and constructing inside a mound — might be detectable at close range, supplementing olfactory cues in the final stages of prey location. This hypothesis remains observational; controlled acoustic studies on pangolin hearing in feeding contexts are limited.

What is clear is that hearing plays a role in predator detection and social interaction. A resting pangolin disturbed by an unfamiliar sound will typically curl into a defensive ball before visually locating the disturbance — the auditory alarm response precedes visual assessment. During the brief mating encounters that have been observed and recorded, soft vocalisations appear to play a role in pair coordination, though pangolins are generally among the least vocal of African mammals.

Eyesight: Adapted for the Dark

Pangolin eyes are small relative to head size, deeply set, and covered by thick muscular eyelids. Histological studies of pangolin retinas show a predominance of rod photoreceptors over cone photoreceptors — a configuration typical of nocturnal mammals that optimises light sensitivity at the cost of colour discrimination and fine detail resolution. The presence of a tapetum lucidum, the reflective layer behind the retina common to many nocturnal animals, further amplifies sensitivity by reflecting incoming light back through the photoreceptor layer for a second pass. This is what produces the characteristic eye-shine when a foraging pangolin is caught in a spotlight at night.

Visual acuity for stationary objects and fine detail appears poor. A pangolin presented with a motionless human observer at ten metres at night may show no visible reaction until it gets considerably closer, at which point it typically stops, orients briefly, and either moves away or curls defensively. Motion detection, however, is considerably better: the same pangolin will react promptly to a moving figure at equivalent distance. This pattern — high motion sensitivity, low acuity — is consistent with the visual system of a prey animal whose primary visual task is detecting approaching predators.

The eyelids serve an additional critical function beyond light regulation. When a pangolin is feeding inside an ant or termite mound, the lids close tightly, protecting the eyes from biting insects, sprayed formic acid, and physical debris. The seal is evidently effective: pangolins feed routinely inside colonies of highly aggressive ant species whose defences would damage the eyes of most other vertebrates.

The Remarkable Tongue

No account of pangolin sensory biology is complete without the tongue — arguably their most extraordinary anatomical structure. In large individuals, the tongue extends to 40 centimetres or more in length. When retracted, it folds back on itself into a muscular sheath that descends below the throat and into the chest cavity, with the tongue's base anchoring near the sternum or, in the largest species, as far back as the pelvis. No other mammal of comparable body size has a tongue that stores in the body cavity rather than in the mouth.

The tongue surface is covered in highly viscous mucus produced by large salivary glands. When inserted into an ant gallery, the mucus adheres to insects on contact; the tongue withdrawal recovers hundreds of individuals per insertion. The mechanics are efficient enough that a foraging pangolin can complete 150 tongue insertions per minute when feeding actively, cycling between insertions with a rhythm that maximises extraction rate from a gallery of known dimensions.

Touch receptors on the tongue surface likely provide the fine-scale sensory feedback that guides tongue placement in the dark interior of an insect gallery. Since pangolins have no teeth and cannot use their tongues for food manipulation after collection — insects go straight from tongue to stomach — the tongue functions more as a combination sensor and adhesive collector than as a manipulator.

A System Built for One Task

The pangolin sensory system is a masterpiece of ecological specialisation. Every element — the nose tuned to colony chemistry, the sealed eyelids and nostrils, the light-sensitive nocturnal eye, the armoured body that lets them work inside insect defences, the extraordinary tongue — is a solution to the specific problem of eating ants and termites in the dark without being bitten to death doing it.

This tight integration of form and function is also, ironically, what makes pangolins so vulnerable to anthropogenic change. An animal whose sensory world is built around the chemical language of insects and the acoustic texture of undisturbed bushveld has few tools to navigate logging roads, electrified fences, or the bewildering sensory environment of a capture and transport crate. Understanding their sensory biology is not just academic fascination — it is the foundation of every rehabilitation protocol, enclosure design, and reintroduction plan that gives pangolins a chance beyond the landscapes they evolved to read.