Published: June 18, 2025
The silence of pangolins is one of the first things that strikes researchers encountering them in the field. In a savanna that fills every night with frog calls, insect stridulation, and the distant sounds of predators and prey, the pangolin moves through the darkness with almost no acoustic signature. It does not call to attract mates, does not alarm-call when predators approach, and does not vocalise to maintain contact with offspring beyond the earliest weeks of life. Yet pangolins are not asocial in a complete sense — they communicate, maintain spatial relationships with neighbours, locate mates, and signal reproductive status. They simply do so through channels that take more effort to detect than sound.
Pangolins are not entirely mute. Two categories of vocalisation have been consistently reported by researchers and rehabilitation practitioners working with Temminck's ground pangolin (Smutsia temminckii) in southern Africa.
The most widely documented sound is a hissing exhalation produced when a pangolin feels cornered or threatened before it has fully committed to the curling defensive posture. The hiss is audible to the human ear at close range and is sometimes accompanied by a forceful expulsion of air from the anus — a deterrent that combines acoustic and olfactory elements in a single response. Handlers at rehabilitation facilities in South Africa describe the hiss as a reliable stress indicator: an animal that is hissing during routine care is not yet habituated to handling and needs a more cautious approach.
Once fully curled, pangolins typically stop vocalising. The ball posture is itself the defensive response, and additional energy expenditure on sound production offers no obvious benefit. Predators capable of unrolling a pangolin — large hyenas and lions have been documented doing so — are unlikely to be deterred by noise, while smaller predators are typically deterred by the armour of scales alone.
A softer and more variable set of sounds has been recorded between mother pangolins and their pups. These include quiet puffing or grunting vocalisations that appear to function as contact calls during the period when the pup rides on the mother's tail or lower back during foraging excursions. The sounds are low in amplitude and would not carry more than a few metres, consistent with a communication function that requires close-range contact rather than long-distance signalling.
As pups age and become more independent, mother-pup vocal exchanges diminish. By the time a young pangolin begins undertaking solo foraging excursions — typically at three to four months of age — the acoustic bond appears to have dissolved, and the juvenile's behaviour becomes indistinguishable from adult solitary patterns.
For a species that relies minimally on sound, the olfactory system is correspondingly elaborate. Temminck's ground pangolin possesses large anal scent glands that produce a pungent secretion. These glands are well-developed in both sexes but are particularly pronounced in adult males. The secretion can be deposited passively as the animal moves through vegetation, or actively applied to specific substrates that the animal selects for marking.
In the field, pangolin scent marks are most commonly found at prominent landscape features: the bases of large termite mounds, burrow entrances, and the rotting stumps of fallen trees. These are locations that other pangolins in the area are likely to encounter during their own foraging movements, making them efficient information nodes in the olfactory network.
The information conveyed by scent marks almost certainly includes identity (allowing individuals to recognise known neighbours), sex and reproductive status, and recency of the depositing individual's visit. Researchers observing GPS-collared pangolins at Tswalu Kalahari Reserve and in the Limpopo have documented animals pausing at known marking sites to investigate before either moving on or depositing their own mark — a behavioural sequence consistent with reading and updating a shared information board.
Whether Temminck's ground pangolin defends a strict exclusive territory in the manner of, say, a leopard is a question the data does not yet resolve cleanly. Home ranges of different individuals overlap substantially when mapped from telemetry data. However, simultaneous use of overlapping areas by different individuals is uncommon — animals appear to space themselves temporally as well as spatially, using scent mark recency to determine whether an area has been recently visited and adjusting their own movements accordingly.
The breeding season for Temminck's ground pangolin in South Africa peaks between July and September, though mating has been recorded in other months. During this period, the spacing behaviour of males changes in ways that have been captured by telemetry studies. Males travel longer nightly distances than during non-breeding periods, crossing areas they do not normally use, and show a pattern of movement consistent with following scent trails rather than foraging in known termite-rich patches.
A receptive female increases scent marking frequency. This elevated marking rate produces a denser trail of olfactory cues through the landscape that males can follow with their sensitive vomeronasal system. Field observers have recorded males arriving at locations visited by females hours earlier and then tracking the female's path across the landscape before eventually making contact.
Mating interactions are brief. Males and females may spend a few hours together at most before separating. The male plays no role in gestation, birth, or pup-rearing. After mating, the female's home range use returns to normal patterns, and the male resumes his own foraging routine, potentially breeding with other females encountered during the same season.
Radio-telemetry studies — initially using VHF transmitters attached to tail bands and more recently incorporating GPS units capable of recording fine-scale positional data — have provided the clearest picture yet of how pangolins organise themselves spatially. The emerging consensus is that pangolins are best described as tolerant solitary animals rather than territorial ones.
Male home ranges in the Limpopo savanna typically span 5 to 25 square kilometres, with considerable variation explained by prey availability and the distribution of burrow sites. Female home ranges tend to be somewhat smaller. These ranges overlap substantially between neighbouring individuals of both sexes, but direct encounters between adults at the same location at the same time are uncommon in the telemetry record.
This pattern — broad spatial overlap with temporal separation — is consistent with olfactory-mediated avoidance. If each individual can determine from scent marks that a particular patch of foraging habitat has been recently visited by another pangolin, it can choose to move on rather than exploit a temporarily depleted resource. This would produce the observed pattern of overlap without direct contest, requiring no territorial exclusion or dominance hierarchy to maintain spacing.
Concentrated termite mound clusters sometimes attract multiple pangolins to the same general area on the same night. Observations from camera traps at such sites suggest that individuals may forage within a few hundred metres of each other without overt conflict, apparently tolerating temporary proximity when the food resource is sufficiently abundant. This conditional tolerance is consistent with a system based on olfactory avoidance rather than active territorial defence — when the payoff from foraging exceeds the cost of proximity to a conspecific, the avoidance rule is overridden.
Captive pangolins, even those held in large and well-managed facilities, sometimes develop stereotypic behaviours — repetitive motor patterns with no obvious functional goal. The most commonly reported stereotypy in pangolins is pacing: repeatedly traversing the same path along an enclosure boundary, often at specific times of day or night corresponding to when the animal would normally be active in the wild.
Stereotypies in captive animals are widely recognised as welfare indicators. Their development reflects an environment that fails to provide adequate outlets for the behavioural repertoire the animal is motivated to express. For pangolins, the primary deficits in most captive settings are: insufficient substrate depth for natural digging and burrowing, absence of complex olfactory environments with varied conspecific scent, and enclosures too small to support the nightly movement distances normal in wild animals.
South African rehabilitation facilities working toward the African Pangolin Working Group's husbandry standards have moved toward large semi-natural enclosures with deep sand substrates, buried artificial burrow systems, and deliberate enrichment of the olfactory environment. These modifications have reduced stereotypy frequency in monitored animals and are associated with better weight gain and feeding motivation — both key indicators of rehabilitation success ahead of release.
Pangolins are largely silent animals. The most commonly reported vocalisation is a hissing sound produced when the animal feels threatened and is preparing to curl into a defensive ball. Mother pangolins have been recorded making soft puffing or grunting sounds when in contact with their pups. Beyond these defensive and maternal contexts, vocalisations are rarely reported in either wild or captive individuals.
Olfactory communication is the primary channel. Pangolins possess large anal scent glands that produce a strong secretion used to mark territory and signal reproductive status. They deposit scent at prominent features in their home range — termite mounds, burrow entrances, and fallen logs. Males investigate these marks when searching for receptive females during the breeding season.
Pangolins are primarily solitary. Adult males and females only associate briefly during mating. Mothers carry and care for single pups for up to three to four months before the young become independent. Radio-telemetry studies show that home ranges of different individuals overlap substantially on maps, but the animals avoid simultaneous use of the same areas, maintaining loose spatial separation without defending hard territorial boundaries.
Males follow scent trails left by females at marking sites and through the landscape. A receptive female increases her marking frequency, which guides males toward her location. Field observations suggest males may travel considerably farther than usual during the breeding season — covering several kilometres in a single night rather than the shorter circuits of normal foraging — in pursuit of female scent.
Captive pangolins sometimes develop stereotypies — repetitive, invariant behaviours with no obvious function — most commonly pacing along enclosure boundaries or repeated climbing and descending of a fixed route. These behaviours are recognised welfare indicators in zoo and rehabilitation settings, signalling that the animal's physical or psychological needs are not being fully met. They are more common in animals kept in small enclosures with insufficient substrate for digging.