‘Superstitious belief kills pangolins’: Q&A with biologist Elisa Panjang

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• Elisa Panjang spends long hours in the field studying pangolin populations, using a combination camera traps, collaring and radio telemetry to monitor the elusive mammal.
• Her work has helped raise the local protection status of the Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) in her home state of Sabah, Malaysia, and she says she’s hopeful that conservationists will be able to save pangolins from extinction.
• Pangolins are the most trafficked animal in the world; their scales are used in traditional medicine and their meat is a delicacy in some countries, despite no evidence to support claims that pangolin body parts have any healing properties.
• Elisa Panjang spoke with Mongabay about the challenges of fieldwork in the Bornean rainforest, the technologies that work (and don’t work) to track pangolins, and the growing global awareness about the need to protect the world’s most trafficked mammal.

When Elisa Panjang was 10 years old, playing outside her home in Sandakan, a small town in Malaysian Borneo, she heard a snuffling sound near the forest’s edge. As she walked closer, a small, scaly creature came into her view. Its odd looks and characteristics intrigued her. She didn’t know it then, but it was a Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica), endemic to Southeast Asia. She scoured the books in her school library, desperate to learn more. She couldn’t find much, but her curiosity about the scaly creature led her down the path to a career in conservation.

“I dreamed of becoming a scientist, just because of this little pangolin that I saw when I was a child,” says Panjang, today the pangolin conservation officer at Danau Girang Field Centre in Malaysia’s Sabah state and a Ph.D. student at Cardiff University in the U.K.

https://news-mongabay-com.cdn.amppr...angolins-qa-with-biologist-elisa-panjang/amp/