Measuring the faecal weight of five pangolins at the Umoya Khulula wildlife centre to estimate effective food intake

The Umoya Khulula Wildlife Centre is a wildlife rescue facility for rehabilitation of animals victim of human-wildlife conflict, poaching and other illegal wildlife activities. They take a role in the conservation of the temminck’s pangolin in South Africa. Pangolins are the world’s most trafficked mammals listed as vulnerable in the IUCN list. The primary threat to most pangolin species is illegal hunting and poaching for local use and illicit international trade. This trade mainly involves pangolin scales and meat, which are primarily trafficked to East and Southeast Asia, and to a lesser extent other body parts. The conservation of these animals is challenging because captive breeding programmes are rarely successful due to insufficient knowledge about their husbandry requirements and their feeding behaviour: they cannot be fed in captivity but need to actively hunt for food, which is an obstacle for their rehabilitation and conservation. The aim of this thesis was to help the Umoya Khulula Wildlife Centre in their project of conservation of Temminck's pangolins trying to implement their knowledge to ensure a better survival of the species in captivity and therefore improve the conservation techniques for the release into the wild. In this study I analyzed faeces of 5 pangolins trying to estimate the daily amount of prey ingested by each of them to understand their effective food intake. Weighing them regularly, before and after the foraging, we tried to understand if it can be sufficient for the sustenance of the animal or if it could negatively influence its release into the wild. During the observation period, the body weight of all pangolins did not show significant variations and, in particular, no significant body weight losses were recorded. Despite the large error rate, the causes of which are under investigation, feed consumption can be estimated by weighing faecal samples and enucleating the exoskeleton of the prey.