How international zoos could save rare species from extinction

Why is the baby panga so significant?

Pangolins have been disappearing from their normal habitats – southern China, southeastern Asia, and Africa – because their unique scales and meat are believed to have medicinal properties in these regions.

As a result, organisations monitoring animal trafficking estimate that at least 200,000 pangolins were hunted and sold in 2019. Based on this data, the World Wildlife Foundation has concluded that a pangolin is poached every three minutes.

Onto matters of saving them from extinction, it should first be said that breeding pangolins in captivity presents a huge challenge.

First, because their diet is unusual, consisting of drone larvae. They also require a very particular level of humidity and atmospheric temperature in order to thrive – which is vital in the initial weeks of their lives.

Because of this, the team of zookeepers at the Prague Zoo struggled to keep the pangolin – called Little Cone – alive her first few days. Named after her tiny stature and scaly exterior, she was born weighing just 135 grams.

Over the next week or so, Little Cone began rapidly losing weight. Her mother wasn’t producing enough milk to help her grow to a full size ­– around 7kg.

Consulting Taiwanese experts on what to do next, workers at the Prague Zoo obtained milk from a mother cat. Surprisingly, this sufficed as Little Cone’s diet until techniques to get her mother to produce milk were met with success.

Little Cone has now been vibing and surviving for about a month.

What can Little Cone teach us about breeding rare species?

The lessons learned through keeping Little Cone alive and well could inform the process of helping other endangered species stay alive – even if that risky endeavor must be carried out beyond the animal’s typical region.

If the environments of rare species can be replicated inside zoos or sanctuaries elsewhere in the world, the possibility of boosting populations and eventually rewilding them when poaching regulations become stronger could become a reality.

It would’ve been great if this could’ve been done with the tragically poached North African white rhino, for example, of which there are only two females left. The last remaining male died in 2018, leaving the only hope of keeping this rhino species alive to future genealogical technology.

I know that with all of our human problems, it may seem trivial to place saving rare and strange-looking animal species near the top of our to-do lists.

But members of future generations will no doubt condemn us for allowing such remarkable species to be eradicated from the planet without at least trying to intervene.

Overcoming the initial challenges of keeping a rare species alive can surely inform and bring confidence to future, similar efforts. Shout out to the workers at Prague Zoo – oh, and Little Cone.