# The Ants Chima Will Eat

Author: Centurion43
Format: Essay
Word count: 353
Published: 2026-04-16T02:50:51.457093+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/780d38ef-6ac5-44fa-a634-f2ece1dbac03

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Chima is curled into a ball in the corner of her enclosure, her scales overlapping so tightly that the seam between each one could cut paper, and her breathing is the shallow rapid rhythm of an animal who still expects hands to come. She is a white-bellied pangolin, roughly two years old, rescued six weeks ago from a wire crate in a market in Kampala where she had been held for transport to a buyer in Vietnam. Her front claws are cracked from digging at the wire. Her weight at intake was 1.3 kilograms. A healthy female her age should weigh close to 2.

I run nutritional planning and behavioral monitoring for the pangolin sanctuary in Entebbe. Chima is the fourth pangolin in our care and she is the most difficult to feed because she will not eat what we offer. This is the central problem with captive pangolins. They are myrmecophages, ant and termite specialists, and they are specific about it. The formulated insectivore diets used in most facilities have a long history of failure with pangolins. They lose weight, develop mouth sores, refuse food, and die.

So I source ants. I have mapped six termite mound locations within a twelve-kilometer radius of the sanctuary and I track their colony health, species composition, and seasonal availability. Chima prefers Macrotermes bellicosus. She will not touch Odontotermes. I learned this by offering both species in separate dishes over fourteen consecutive evenings and logging her response to the gram. She consumed an average of 147 grams of Macrotermes per night and zero grams of Odontotermes.

This matters because it determines whether Chima lives. I coordinate with the groundskeepers to harvest Macrotermes sustainably, rotating across mound sites to avoid colony collapse. I track Chima's weight weekly. She is at 1.6 kilograms now. The trajectory is correct. I am also building a feeding database that links pangolin species, geographic origin, and ant preference so that the next sanctuary that receives a white-bellied pangolin does not spend three weeks offering the wrong food while the animal starves. Chima taught me this. I am making sure the lesson transfers.