A short story of how silly numbers end up in mainstream discourse when journalists don't do their job. I was reading the article linked here and paused for a second when I got to the highlighted part in the screenshot. 1/7 www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025... - ThreadSky

nikolaj-bi.bsky.social • 4 days ago

A short story of how silly numbers end up in mainstream discourse when journalists don't do their job. I was reading the article linked here and paused for a second when I got to the highlighted part in the screenshot.

1/7

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-05-18-wildlife-trafficking-now-crime-networks-plunder-africa/

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nikolaj-bi.bsky.social•4 days ago

100,000 tonnes of pangolin scales seized in a year? And with an estimate of only 10% of the trade being seized? So a total of a million tonnes of scales?

And he just wrote that it takes 1,800 pangolins to make a tonne of scales, which would mean 1,8 billion pangolins...

Billion. With a B.

nikolaj-bi.bsky.social•4 days ago

That seems excessive, to say the least. That would have made it hard to walk, prior to 2019, without tripping over pangolins.

So I looked up where he got the number from, in the report linked here.

https://wildlifejustice.org/publications/disruption-and-disarray-an-analysis-of-pangolin-scale-and-ivory-trafficking-2015-2024/?utm_source=Confidential+Donor+Update&utm_campaign=050aafc93a-New+structure+and+boards_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ef0a040397-050aafc93a-

nikolaj-bi.bsky.social•4 days ago

And found this in the introduction. It says what the journalist wrote (although it's tons and not tonnes, which is a different measure, but that's a minor error).

Their source for this is another report. Page 227 in the linked report by UNODC. Let's look at that one.

https://www.unodc.org/cofrb/uploads/documents/ECOS/World_Wildlife_Crime_Report_2024.pdf

nikolaj-bi.bsky.social•4 days ago

Well well. What a surprise. Turns out it was around 100,000 kg in 2019 and not 100,000 tons. So both the Wildlife Justice Commission report and the journalist were off by a factor of 1000 and applied no common sense to what they were reading.

nikolaj-bi.bsky.social•4 days ago

Imagine writing a whole report specifically about illegal pangolin scale trade and then being wrong about the scale of pangolin scale trade by a factor of 1000. You had one job.

And how does a journalist just accept numbers like this at face value instead of diving into the sources of the report?

nikolaj-bi.bsky.social•4 days ago

How this will probably go now is that the faulty second report and faulty article will get more traction than the first report and the CITES data, so the notion that hundreds of thousands of tons of pangolin scales are smuggled every year is the misinformation that scientists will have to deal with.

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