Sunday, January 3, 2010

My DSLR and Pangolin..


Digital Single-Lens Reflex Camera, that's what they call it.

I bought a Nikon D60, with a AF18-55mm lens.



alright let's forget the technical cuz I'ma newbie >_<

anyway stumbled upon an article in Nat Geo yesterday regarding Pangolin.
Google that up if you dont even know what a Pangolin is...

Anyway this is a pangolin.


It's a scaly animal like an armadillo(google that up if you don't know tat too), and it's now being threatened by human activities including poaching and deforestation. Because of growing demand for pangolin meat and scales, the toothless creature is now being hunted to the edge of extinction.

This animal is native to the Indian subcontinent, Asia and Africa. In China, this animal is particularly prized for its meat and scale. The sad fact is that pangolin mothers typically produce just one pup per litter, and only few survives to adulthood.



July 14, 2009--A rare pangolin fetus floats in soup in Indonesia in 2008. Some practitioners of Asian traditional medicine believe pangolin-fetus soup increases a man's virility. (photos and information courtesy of NatGeo.com)


A poacher in a pangolin-processing house prepares to boil a carcass in Indonesia in 2008. The pangolin will then be de-scaled and gutted for freezing and shipping into China, the primary market for pangolin products.

Last year officials intercepted 38 tons of frozen pangolin carcasses being smuggled into China. That's 38 tons man!! 38000Kg of pangolins... that's a lot of slow-reproducing individuals you see, and naturally of course, the number started to dwindle ages ago..The mammals' plummeting numbers could have nasty side effects, because pangolins perform millions of dollars' worth of pest control. As anteaters, they eat annoying termites and ants and help save your house from collapsing, which of course doesn't happen because you do not have a pet pangolin..

People, there are hundreds of other species listed as threatened or critically endangered.. and I will repeat this again and again; it's time to act or our children will have to acknowledge the existence of the animal via encyclopedias or museums..like the Dodo bird(Discovered 1598, extinct by 1681) and Tasmanian Tiger (extinct 1936)..


Malcolm =)

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