Not long ago, Professor Yu Li’s team from the School of Life Sciences of Yunnan University announced that they had discovered a new pangolin, temporarily named"Manismysteria". This is the 9th known species of pangolin and the 5th species of Asian pangolin. The reason why this new species of pangolin is given such a "mysterious" name isThat's because the research team had never actually seen the animal. Again, they have no idea where this animal lives.
After reading this, you may be slapping the table: a new species of an animal you have never seen before has been published and even named. Scientific research work is so unserious!
Don't worry, saying that scientists have never seen this kind of pangolin is slightly inaccurate. In fact, they did see this kind of pangolin, but the individual they saw was not complete-not even "partial". Maybe you have guessed,The research team identified this new species based on "nail plates".
For well-known reasons, all animals in the pangolin family have been listed as key protection targets. Among them, the Chinese pangolin (M.pentadactyla) is a national first-level protected animal in my country.
The entire pangolin family, including the Chinese pangolin, is listed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, and any commercial use of the species from the wild is prohibited. However, poaching and illegal trade of pangolins continues. Large-scale pangolin smuggling cases have been uncovered in many places in China.
In 2012 and 2013, Hong Kong Customs detected and confiscated 27 pangolin scales. Dr. Zhang Huarong's team at the Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden in Hong Kong analyzed these 27 armor plates and found that two new haplotypes may have nothing to do with the eight living species of pangolins known at the time.
However, the gene fragments detected at that time were very limited, so it was not possible to draw more definite conclusions.
Following such clues, Yu Li's team analyzed samples from two batches of pangolin scales confiscated in Yunnan Province in 2015 and 2019. finalized,A new pangolin species does exist.The temporary naming of this species as the "mysterious pangolin" is a reflection of this incredible research process.
Scales of a new pangolin species found in seized samples. Image source: Yang Feng (Kadoorie Farm Botanical Garden, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China)
Previously, there were 8 species of pangolins known to humans, 4 of which were distributed in Asia and 4 in Africa. All four species of Asian pangolins are classified into the genus Manis and are closely related. The "mysterious pangolin" confirmed this time split from the Philippine pangolin (M.culionensis) and the Sunda pangolin (M.javanica) about 5 million years ago.
Asian pangolins are found in southern China, South Asia and Southeast Asia. This area has extremely high environmental diversity and obvious habitat differentiation, so there are a large number of unknown species that have not yet been discovered by scientists. The discovery of the ninth pangolin species shows that we need more research on Asian pangolins.
This discovery is based on comparative research in molecular biology and has certain comparative data on nail plate morphology. But the problem is,Scientists have no way to trace the source of nail flakes.
Currently, all pangolins are protected species. Technically, there are no legally imported pangolins. In the illegal trade, poachers usually remove the armor plates and group them together for transportation and sale, while the carcasses without armor plates are grouped together.
Therefore, the smuggled armor pieces are all mixed together in a large pile. In recent years, several major cases have involved one ton or two tons of armor flakes. In 2021, Guangdong Customs even cracked a major case involving 8 tons of armor flakes.
An Asian pangolin weighs about 0.5 kilograms with its body armor combined. In other words, one ton of armor fragments comes from two thousand pangolins. Moreover, these illegally traded armor pieces,There is no way to trace which country they come from, nor which island or forest they come from.
Pictures come from the Internet
Therefore, we currently have no idea what the ninth species of pangolin looks like, let alone its distribution, quantity, and habitat. It is indeed extremely rare to release a new species of animal through this method.
New research shows that this species has a high inbreeding coefficient. In other words, the probability of "inbred marriage" among mysterious pangolin individuals is higher.
The occurrence of such a situation probably means that they are either distributed on a small island or an isolated forest and are a very small population; or they have experienced a catastrophe and the number of individuals has become very rare - the species itself is already in an extremely fragile state.
It is worth mentioning that the name "mysterious pangolin" given by scientists to this new species is a "tentative name". Because strictly speaking, if you want to formally describe and name a species, you need to discover the species itself and establish a "type specimen."
At present, we only know that they exist, but we cannot see what they look like, establish type specimens, and cannot formally name them.
If the illegal trade of wild animals cannot be completely eliminated as soon as possible, perhaps scientists and perhaps we will never be able to see the true face of the "mysterious pangolin". It will be "tentatively named" forever.
References
[1]Tong-TongGuetal, Genomicanalysisrevealsacrypticpangolinspecies,ProceedingsoftheNationalAcademyofSciences(2023).DOI:10.1073/pnas.2304096120
Planning and production
Author | Flower eclipse science writer Xu Lai science writer
Review｜Huang Chengming, researcher at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Planning｜Xu Lai
Editor丨Yang Yaping