Pangolin Sounds and Vocalisation: How Pangolins Communicate
Pangolins are often described as silent animals. Compared to the vocal repertoires of primates, birds, or even rodents, they produce relatively few sounds. Yet to conclude that pangolins are non-communicative would be a serious error. These extraordinary animals have developed a rich, if understated, set of communication channels that rely on sound, scent, touch, and the detection of environmental vibrations. Understanding how pangolins communicate requires moving beyond the human bias toward vocalisation as the primary measure of communicative sophistication.
Vocal Sounds: Limited but Meaningful
Pangolins possess a larynx and are physiologically capable of producing sound, but they use it sparingly. The vocalisation repertoire documented across the eight pangolin species is small, and the sounds produced are generally low in complexity when compared to most other similarly sized mammals. This is consistent with their evolutionary strategy: stealth and concealment rather than social signalling through sound.
Hissing as a Threat Response
The most commonly documented pangolin vocalisation is a hiss, produced when the animal feels threatened and cannot immediately escape or curl into its defensive ball. This hiss is a sharp, forceful exhalation through narrowed airways and serves as an auditory warning to a perceived predator or human handler. It is analogous to the hissing of many reptile species and conveys a clear message: the animal is aware of the threat and is preparing a defensive response.
The hiss is often accompanied by physical posturing. The animal may flatten its scales, lower its head, or begin to orient its sharp-scaled tail toward the threat. In some observations, the hiss escalates in volume or frequency if the threat persists. Rescue centre staff consistently report hissing as the most common sound produced by newly admitted pangolins, where it functions as a stress vocalisation as much as a direct predator warning.
Puffing Sounds
A softer, more rhythmic puffing or snorting sound is observed in pangolins during periods of moderate alertness or mild disturbance. This is distinct from the sharp threat-hiss and is thought to function as a low-level arousal signal. In captive settings, some rehabilitators have noted that puffing sounds are produced when an animal detects an unfamiliar scent or hears an unexpected noise without being able to visually locate the source. The sound may serve to buy time while the animal processes sensory information before deciding whether to flee or curl.
Puffing sounds have also been documented in male pangolins during encounters with other males. In these contexts, the sound appears to signal awareness of a competitor without triggering immediate physical confrontation. Whether this constitutes true social communication or is simply a reflexive arousal response remains a subject of discussion among researchers.
Mother-Pup Communication
The most socially rich period in a pangolin's life is early development, when the bond between mother and pup is the only sustained social relationship the animal will have. During this period, vocalisation plays a more prominent role than at any other point in the animal's life.
Pangolin pups produce a range of soft calls that function to maintain contact with the mother and signal distress when separated. These calls are higher in frequency than adult pangolin vocalisations and include chirping or peeping sounds that have been documented in ground pangolin pups in South African rehabilitation settings. The calls are audible to human observers at close range but are not loud, reflecting the evolutionary pressure to avoid drawing predator attention to a vulnerable young animal.
Mothers respond to pup distress calls with behavioural changes including searching movements and, in some documented cases, soft vocalisations of their own that appear to be directed at the pup. The nature and function of these maternal responses has not been formally quantified in wild populations due to the difficulty of observing wild pangolin families, but observations from captive breeding programmes and rehabilitation centres suggest that mother-pup vocal exchange is a genuine and functional communication channel.
As pups mature and begin to ride on the mother's tail during foraging excursions, the vocal communication appears to diminish, possibly replaced by tactile and olfactory cues as the primary maintenance signals for the pair bond.
Snuffling During Foraging
A distinctive snuffling or snorting sound is produced by foraging pangolins as they work through soil and leaf litter in search of ant and termite colonies. This sound is not strictly communicative in intent; it is a functional consequence of the animal's foraging method. Pangolins close their nostrils and ears tightly when excavating and inserting their tongue into insect mounds, and the sounds produced during this process are related to the clearing of soil particles from nasal passages and the management of breathing during intensive digging activity.
However, the snuffling of a foraging pangolin has secondary communicative implications. In the wild, the sounds of active foraging may signal territory use or resource occupancy to other pangolins in the vicinity. Given that pangolins have partially overlapping home ranges and appear to avoid direct encounters with conspecifics, auditory cues from active foraging may help individuals space themselves efficiently in the landscape without direct interaction.
Scent Marking as the Primary Communication Channel
If vocal communication is a minor tool in the pangolin's repertoire, scent marking is the major one. Pangolins possess large, well-developed scent glands in the anal region that produce a pungent secretion. The composition of this secretion varies between individuals and between sexes, providing a chemical signature that conveys information about identity, sex, reproductive status, and possibly age or health condition.
Scent marks are deposited on vegetation, logs, rocks, and soil along travel routes and at territory boundaries. The marking behaviour is most intense in adult males during periods of reproductive activity, but females also scent mark, particularly around denning sites. The persistence of scent marks in the environment allows pangolins to communicate across time as well as space: an animal encountering a fresh versus old mark may adjust its behaviour accordingly, either approaching or avoiding the area based on the inferred presence and recency of another individual.
Faecal and Urine Marking
In addition to anal gland secretions, pangolins deposit faeces and urine at specific locations rather than randomly. These latrines appear to serve a communicative function. Field researchers tracking ground pangolins in southern Africa have identified sites where multiple animals deposit faeces over time, creating information-rich locations analogous to the scent posts used by many carnivores. Analysis of these sites suggests they may function as mutual advertisement points where individuals can assess the presence and characteristics of others in the same area without direct contact.
Ground Vibration Detection
One of the less-discussed but potentially significant communication channels for pangolins involves their sensitivity to substrate-borne vibrations. Pangolins have relatively poor eyesight but possess sensory systems well-adapted for detecting movement through the ground. This sensitivity serves a dual function: foraging detection (locating insect colonies through the vibrations of colony activity and through the substrate itself as they dig) and threat detection (sensing approaching footsteps before visual or auditory cues would be available).
Whether ground-borne vibrations also function as a communication channel between pangolins, as is the case in elephants and some other large mammals, has not been definitively established. However, the physical capability exists, and some researchers have proposed that substrate vibrations produced during foraging or movement could be detectable by other pangolins in proximity. This remains an area where formal acoustic research could yield interesting findings.
What Research Reveals About Pangolin Acoustic Behaviour
Formal acoustic research on pangolins is surprisingly sparse given the global conservation profile of the group. The challenges are significant: pangolins are nocturnal, solitary, and secretive, making field recording and systematic observation difficult. Much of what is known comes from opportunistic recordings in rehabilitation settings, observations during veterinary handling, and incidental documentation during radio-telemetry studies focused on movement ecology.
A small number of studies have attempted to characterise the vocalisation repertoire of specific species. Research on Sunda pangolins (Manis javanica) in Southeast Asian rescue facilities has documented the threat-hiss, pup distress calls, and low-frequency puffing sounds as the consistent core repertoire. Similar findings have emerged from studies on ground pangolins (Smutsia temminckii) in South Africa.
One productive area of emerging research involves passive acoustic monitoring in habitats where pangolins are known to be present. Deploying autonomous recording units in areas with confirmed pangolin activity and analysing the resulting audio for characteristic pangolin sounds offers a potential monitoring tool that does not require direct animal observation or capture. Pilot studies using this approach have had mixed results, partly because the sounds pangolins produce are not loud and are easily masked by environmental noise, and partly because the specific acoustic signatures have not been comprehensively catalogued.
Comparative Acoustic Biology
Placing pangolin communication in comparative context is instructive. Among placental mammals, the pholidotes (the order containing pangolins) are an isolated lineage with no close living relatives. Their nearest phylogenetic neighbours in broad terms are the carnivores and the ungulates, but these groups differ enormously in their social structures and communication strategies. Pangolins' solitary, chemosensory-primary communication system has more in common with some mustelids (such as badgers and skunks) than with their phylogenetically closer relatives, illustrating how ecological pressures can converge on similar communication strategies in unrelated lineages.
The Limits of Our Knowledge
It is worth being honest about how much remains unknown. Pangolins have not received the sustained acoustic research attention devoted to dolphins, bats, elephants, or even rodents. The combination of their secretive behaviour, their nocturnal habits, and the technical difficulty of working in their habitats has meant that systematic studies of pangolin communication are few in number and often limited in sample size.
What is clear is that pangolins are not silent. They produce sounds that serve specific functions at specific moments in their lives. They communicate richly through scent in ways that structure their social landscape across time and space. They may detect and respond to ground-borne vibrations in ways that have not yet been fully characterised. The picture that emerges is of an animal whose communication system is perfectly calibrated for a life of solitary stealth: minimal, efficient, and deeply integrated with the sensory ecology of the nocturnal forest and savanna environments they inhabit.
Further acoustic research, particularly in wild populations using non-invasive recording methods, has the potential to significantly expand our understanding of how these extraordinary animals communicate. This knowledge is not only scientifically interesting; it has practical applications in developing better monitoring tools and in improving the care of pangolins in rehabilitation settings, where understanding stress communication signals could meaningfully improve outcomes for animals in care.