oakenday

Louise could probably answer this more thoroughly, but as this BBC article outlines pangolins are most valued for their meat and use in traditional Chinese medicine.

They are also extremely easy to catch, since the pangolin's defense mechanism is to stop moving and curl into a ball. Something that works great against tigers (their scales are nearly impenetrable to a tiger's teeth) but works terribly when it's just some poachers with cloth bags reaching down to pick them up.

A horse sized pangolin sounds like a Dark Souls boss. Guess I should git gud.

I've always been torn between science, art, writing, and philosophy, so I changed majors frequently. I started out wanting to design video games, then wanted to build robots, study dinosaurs, and through a very long journey ended up with a BA in English of all things, lol. But I still wanted to do something with science so I ended up getting a MA in Environmental Education and studied how children understand and are influenced by media regarding elephants, and a few other animals.

It was then that I discovered I could research and study science communication more broadly. Am currently ABD in a PhD in Communication Studies focused on environmental and science communication and teach full time. The question of science education, nature education, social movements around these, and so forth is particularly fascinating to me.

I met Louise through a mutual colleague who I had met at /r/babyelephantgifs regarding an elephant conservation kid's book. Through my research on media influences on children (and interests in art and writing) I started a children's book company to partner with scientists in teaching science literacy in playful ways.

Looking at the pangolin books out there, most don't represent the species very well at all, putting them into human-like romantic encounters (even the recent Google doodle did this), but the more ecological books read like textbooks. We wanted something playful and fun that represented the species accurately.

Louise has done A LOT more with pangolins than I have, so I'm excited as well to read her response to your question. She just went on a tour through a few US cities working with elementary school kids about pangolins too!

I've not seen that episode, but I grew up on shows like that. Kratt's Creatures, Bill Nye, Beakman's World, Brainiac, even Fred Penner's Place.

They don't ever tend to show the data collection part of science, nor the staring at SPSS results and writing papers, but they make science fun and interesting.

People care about what they love, and they love what they know, and they like to know what's fascinating. So I think shows, books, curriculums like this are pretty awesome. I'd guess they are a significant influence into why I'm doing the things I'm doing today.

Pandas. Because every party is a pandamonium.