12
PATRICIA MARSHALL
on the animals. Elephants and rhinos without food quickly left and with them many of the smaller animals. Much of the top soil disappeared. Without trees to hold it in place the rain washed the soil into rivers and out to sea.
Even today a thousand years later the soil, flora and fauna have not recovered from the drastic deforestation carried out by the early settlers.
A small fraction of the animals have been able to adapt themselves to this change in the vegetation. Of the seventeen orders of living placental mammals eight are represented today (see Table 1). There are insectivores such as shrews; a number of bats; at least one wild primate; pangolins; rodents which include rats, mice and porcupines; and a number of spectacular carnivores foxes, leopard-cats, otters and civets. There are also two hoofed animals, the wild boar and barking deer.
Pangolin
The most interesting local mammal is the pangolin (Plate 1). Pangolins have no near relatives but form an order of their own, the Pholidota. The back and tail of the pangolin is encased in scales which are modified hairs; and the skin of the face, belly and eyelids is thick to resist the stings of ants, bees and wasps. The claws are strong enough to dig through termite mounds and to demolish rotting tree trunks. The tongue is long and sticky for collecting termites and ant, bee or wasp larvae. The pangolin lives in a burrow, is nocturnal and is seldom seen, but it is fairly widespread in the Colony. A voracious destroyer of termites and pests it does much good and no harm to man.
The pangolin does not take well to captivity. It is almost impossible to provide it with sufficient termites or ant larvae. It cannot be weaned onto an alternative diet, and although it may eat custard or milk this will not maintain it. Within a few weeks a captive dies.
Pangolins brought to the Zoology Department of the University of Hong Kong are weighed, measured, marked and released in a suitable breeding area where others are known to be present. This is of far greater use to mankind than keeping them to die in captivity.
Carnivores are the flesh eaters, and the most exclusively carnivorous of the carnivores is the tiger. Before 1940 tigers often