If pangolins went extinct, tropical and subtropical ecosystems across Asia and Africa would lose a keystone insect predator, a natural soil engineer, and a surprising driver of biodiversity recovery. The ripple effects would touch everything from termite populations and forest health to the survival of dozens of other species that depend on pangolin burrows for shelter. All eight pangolin species are currently declining and at risk of extinction, making this less of a hypothetical and more of a real possibility.
Insect Populations Would Surge
A single adult pangolin eats an estimated 70 million insects per year, primarily ants and termites. Multiply that by every pangolin across two continents, and you get a sense of the sheer volume of pest control these animals provide for free. Without them, termite and ant colonies would face far less predation pressure, allowing populations to grow unchecked in regions where pangolins are the dominant insect predator.
Research comparing habitats with and without vertebrate insect predators has shown exactly what this looks like. In predator-free areas, termite nest density is significantly higher and wood consumption rates increase substantially. That means more trees being eaten from the inside, faster breakdown of structural wood, and shifts in how carbon moves through forest ecosystems. Termites are essential decomposers in healthy forests, but without predators keeping their numbers in balance, they can tip from helpful recyclers into destructive forces that accelerate tree damage and alter nutrient cycling on a landscape scale.
Forests Would Lose a Natural Groundskeeper
Pangolins are diggers. They excavate burrows for shelter and tear open insect mounds to feed, and all that digging turns out to be ecologically valuable. Their burrowing turns over organic matter, aerates compacted soil, and physically breaks down material in ways that help minerals and nutrients cycle through the ecosystem. Think of it as natural tilling. Soil that gets regularly disturbed by pangolin activity drains better, holds more oxygen, and supports healthier root systems for surrounding plants.
Without pangolins performing this work, soils in their native habitats would become more compacted over time, particularly in tropical forests where heavy rainfall already pushes soil toward dense, low-oxygen conditions. The loss would be gradual but cumulative, slowly degrading soil quality in areas where pangolins were once common.
Other Species Would Lose Critical Shelter
Pangolin burrows don’t just serve pangolins. Once abandoned, these underground chambers become shelter for a wide range of other animals. A 2025 study on Chinese pangolins in burned forest sites found that burrow habitats functioned as hubs for multi-species coexistence. Plants colonized the disturbed soil around burrows more readily than surrounding ground, and animals, especially birds, intensively used burrow sites for resources and shelter.
The connections run deeper than simple shelter. Birds visiting burrow sites helped disperse plant seeds from unburned areas into fire-damaged zones, and from burrow habitats outward into the broader burned landscape. One year after a forest fire, areas with pangolin burrows had significantly more complex and stable networks of plant and animal species than equivalent burned areas without burrows. In other words, pangolin burrows accelerate the recovery of entire ecosystems after disturbance. Lose the pangolins, and you lose that recovery engine.
Forests Would Recover More Slowly After Fires
This biodiversity restoration role deserves its own emphasis because it’s one of the least obvious consequences of pangolin extinction. Wildfires are increasing in frequency and severity across tropical regions due to climate change and land-use shifts. Pangolin burrows give burned forests a head start on recovery by creating micro-habitats where seeds can germinate, insects can recolonize, and birds can forage. The ecological network that forms around a single burrow site radiates outward, seeding recovery across a wider area.
Without this process, burned forests would take longer to rebuild their plant communities, support fewer animal species during the critical early recovery period, and remain more vulnerable to erosion and further degradation. For regions that already struggle with deforestation and habitat loss, removing pangolins from the equation would compound an existing problem.
The Trophic Cascade Effect
When a species that consumes 70 million insects a year disappears, the effects don’t stop at insect population growth. Higher termite densities change how quickly dead wood breaks down, which alters carbon storage in forest soils. More termites mean more methane emissions from their colonies, a small but real contribution to greenhouse gas levels when scaled across tropical forests. Shifts in ant populations can change which plant species thrive, since many tropical plants depend on specific ant species for seed dispersal or defense against herbivores.
Meanwhile, predators that occasionally feed on pangolins lose a food source. Large cats, hyenas, and pythons all prey on pangolins in various parts of their range. While no predator depends exclusively on pangolins, losing any prey species forces predators to shift their hunting pressure onto other animals, potentially destabilizing those populations too. These cascading effects are difficult to predict precisely, but they follow a well-established ecological pattern: remove one piece, and the system compensates in ways that create new imbalances.
How Close This Scenario Actually Is
Pangolins are the most trafficked mammals on Earth. All eight species, four in Asia and four in Africa, are declining. In 2016, every pangolin species received the highest level of international trade protection, a move that reflected how severely poaching and habitat loss had already reduced their numbers. At least one species, Temminck’s ground pangolin, is listed as endangered under U.S. law, and the broader trend across all species points in the same direction.
The ecological consequences described above wouldn’t arrive overnight. They would build slowly as pangolin populations thin out, with local effects appearing first in regions where populations collapse entirely. Some of these effects are likely already underway in parts of Southeast Asia where pangolin numbers have dropped most sharply. The question isn’t purely hypothetical. It’s a matter of degree, and of how much further populations can fall before the ecological damage becomes difficult to reverse.