Background Pangolins are trafficked in unsustainable volumes to feed both local and global trade networks for their meat and the medicinal properties of their derivatives, including scales. We focus on a West African country (Benin) to assess the medicinal and spiritual values of pangolins among different ethnic groups and identify the cohort of buyers involved in the pangolin trade and related economic values along the chain, notably from local diasporas. Methods We organised 54 focus groups in villages surrounding occurrence habitats of pangolins across Benin and conducted 35 individual interviews with vendors from five major traditional medicine markets (TMMs). Our questionnaire addressed the different uses of pangolins, the commercial value of pangolin items, the categories of clients and the related selling prices. Results Pangolin meat was strictly consumed as food. Scales, head, bones, tongue, blood, heart and xiphisternum were the items used by local communities as part of medicinal (65% of the focus groups) and spiritual (37%) practices. Scales were the most frequently used item (use value index = 1.56). A total of 42 medicinal and spiritual uses, covering 15 International Classification of Diseases (ICD) categories, were recorded among ethnic groups. The ICD and spiritual categories-based analyses of similarity showed a partial overlapping of ethnozoological knowledge across Benin, although knowledge was significantly influenced by ethnicity and geographic location. The pricing of pangolins both varied with the category of stakeholders (local communities vs. stakeholders of TMMs) and clients (local and West African clients vs. Chinese community) and the type of items sold. The Chinese community was reported to only buy pangolins alive, and average selling prices were 3–8 times higher than those to West African clients. Conclusions Our results confirm that pangolins in Africa are valuable and versatile resources for consumption and medicinal / spiritual practices. The pangolin trade in Benin is based on an endogenous and complex network of actors that now appears influenced by the specific, high-valued demand from the Chinese diaspora. Further investigations are required to assess the growing impact of the Chinese demand on the African wildlife trade.

We conducted in the Dahomey Gap (DG) a pioneer study on the genetic tracing of the African pangolin trade. We sequenced and genotyped 189 white-bellied pangolins from 18 forests and 12 wildlife markets using one mitochondrial fragment and 20 microsatellites loci. Tree-based assignment procedure showed the 'endemicity' of the pangolin trade, as strictly fed by the lineage endemic to the DG (DGL). DGL populations were characterized by low levels of genetic diversity, an overall absence of equilibrium, inbreeding depression and lack of geographic structure. We identified a 92-98% decline in DGL effective population size 200-500 ya –concomitant with major political transformations along the 'Slave Coast' – leading to contemporaneous estimates inferior to minimum viable population size. Genetic tracing suggested that wildlife markets from the DG sourced through the entire DGL range. Our loci provided the necessary power to distinguish among all the genotyped pangolins, tracing the dispatch of same individuals on the markets and within local communities. We developed an approach combining rarefaction analysis of private allele frequencies and cross-validation with observed data that could trace five traded pangolins to their forest origin, c. 200-300 km away from the markets. Although the genetic toolkit that we designed from traditional markers can prove helpful to trace the pangolin trade, our tracing ability was limited by the lack of population structure within DGL. Given the deleterious combination of genetic, demographic and trade-related factors affecting DGL populations, the conservation status of white-bellied pangolins in the DG should be urgently re-evaluated.