Pangolin Sounds and Vocalisation: How Silent Animals Communicate
Ask most wildlife researchers to describe a pangolin's soundscape and they will pause. These animals move through the night in near-total silence, leaving so little acoustic trace that they were once considered completely mute by Western science. That characterisation was wrong — but only partly. Pangolins do communicate, and they do make sounds. The question is what those sounds mean, how they compare across species, and why scent has taken over most of the communication work that sound handles in other mammals.
The Threat Response: Puffing and Hissing
The most commonly documented pangolin vocalisations occur during threat encounters. When a pangolin is disturbed but has not yet committed to curling — perhaps if the threat is uncertain or the animal is in an open space with no immediate shelter — it produces a sharp puffing exhalation through the nose. This is sometimes described as a snort. In more extreme encounters, the puffing escalates to a sustained hiss.
These sounds are generated by forcing air through a partially constricted nasal passage. They do not involve the larynx in the way mammalian calls typically do, which explains why pangolins cannot produce the modulated, tonal vocalisations that characterise most social mammals. The sounds are loud enough to startle a human at close range but would carry only a few metres in a forest or scrubland environment.
The function is almost certainly aposematic — a warning that the animal is preparing its defensive curl. In some recordings, the puffing is accompanied by a spreading of the scales and rocking of the body. Predators that have encountered pangolin musk before appear to recognise this signal and withdraw.
Foraging Sounds: Snuffling and Digging
The most frequent sounds a wild pangolin produces are not vocalisations at all, but the mechanical sounds of foraging. As a pangolin investigates a termite mound or ant colony, it produces continuous soft snuffling — nasal air pressure being used to probe crevices and assess prey density. This snuffling is audible at one to two metres and is the sound most often picked up in remote audio recordings near active pangolin territories.
Accompanying this is the rhythmic scraping of remarkably powerful claws against compacted soil and wood. A foraging pangolin at a mature termite mound can be heard clearly from several metres away on still nights. This is not intentional communication but an unavoidable acoustic byproduct of behaviour — yet predators and, potentially, conspecifics may use it as locational information.
Mother and Pup Communication
The most socially complex acoustic behaviour pangolins display occurs between mothers and their single offspring. Pups are born with soft, undeveloped scales and are entirely dependent on their mothers for the first three to four months of life. During this period, a range of soft vocalisations have been documented.
Pups produce gentle, high-pitched squeaks when cold, hungry, or briefly separated from the mother. These calls are quiet — presumably an adaptation to avoid attracting predators — but clearly audible to the mother at close range. Mothers respond with a slower, lower-pitched version of the same sound, which appears to have a settling function. In captive breeding situations, keepers have learned to distinguish between a contented pup's intermittent squeaks and the more urgent, repeated calls that indicate distress.
Tactile communication is inseparable from acoustic communication at this life stage. Pups ride on the base of the mother's tail, maintaining near-constant physical contact. When the mother curls defensively, the pup is enclosed within her body — a form of communication that is entirely non-acoustic but carries the critical message: danger, stay still.
The Primacy of Scent: Chemical Communication
Sound is secondary in pangolin communication. Scent is primary. Pangolins possess large, paired anal scent glands that produce a powerful, musky secretion. The glands are proportionally much larger than in most other mammals — in some adults they account for a significant fraction of lower body mass — reflecting the enormous importance of chemical signalling in their social lives.
Scent marking is deposited on rocks, fallen logs, burrow entrances, and conspicuous landscape features along regular ranging routes. The marks convey information about identity, sex, and reproductive status. Males in breeding condition increase marking frequency substantially, and females entering oestrus deposit marks that draw males from considerable distances. The specific chemistry of these secretions has not been fully characterised, but field studies show that pangolins investigate conspecific scent marks intensively, spending several minutes at each site.
Urine is used as a supplementary chemical channel. Pangolins urinate at scent-marking sites, apparently layering information across multiple secretion types. Some researchers have proposed that the scales themselves — which have a distinctive odour in healthy animals — may function as a passive chemical billboard, though this remains to be confirmed experimentally.
Comparing African and Asian Species
Temminck's ground pangolin (Smutsia temminckii), the species most studied in southern Africa, is a large, terrestrial animal whose defensive vocalisations tend to be lower-pitched and more resonant than those of smaller Asian species. This likely reflects body size: larger resonating chambers produce lower frequencies. The puffing-hiss of Temminck's pangolin can carry further and may be audible to predators at greater distances.
Asian species show interesting variation. The Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica), a tree-climbing species from Southeast Asia, has been recorded producing slightly more varied defensive sounds in captive settings, possibly because arboreal environments reward more nuanced acoustic communication — distance, direction, and substrate all affect how sound travels differently in a canopy compared to open ground. The Philippine pangolin (Manis culionensis) remains almost completely unstudied acoustically. The Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) has been observed producing puffing vocalisations similar to African species, suggesting this is a conserved trait across the Pholidota order.
What Researchers Have Recorded
Systematic acoustic study of pangolins in the wild is sparse. The combination of nocturnal habits, low vocalisation rates, and difficult terrain makes passive acoustic monitoring challenging. Most documentation comes from captive individuals, which may vocalise more (due to stress) or less (due to reduced social context) than wild counterparts.
What is clear is that pangolins are not mute — they are acoustically restrained. In a world where their primary defence is armour rather than flight, staying quiet makes evolutionary sense. The sounds they do produce are precise and purposeful: a warning to a predator, a reassurance to a pup, a foraging noise that cannot be helped. The rest of their social world is written in scent, on rocks and logs along paths that only other pangolins know to read.