environment – Page 4 – Pain In The Bud

Amazing Cats: The Sunda Clouded Leopard

This singular species of wildcat exists only on two islands and has evolved to live a semi-arboreal existence deep in the jungle.

While tigers, lions and domestic cats are the stars of the felid world and command the lion’s share (pun intended) of the attention, even from cat lovers, there are obscure species living in far-off locations where they’re rarely glimpsed by human eyes.

There’s the fishing cat, the black-footed cat and the sand cat, and then there are species that are obscure even among the obscure. The Sunda clouded leopard fits into that category, inasmuch as the unique felid can fit into any category.

Like orangutans, the Sunda clouded leopard can be found in only two places in the world: the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra. They’re faced with the same existential threat that has pushed orangutans dangerously close to extinction, which is the relentless destruction of old-growth jungle to clear land for more palm oil plantations.

Palm oil is coveted by multinational corporations in the food and cosmetics businesses, and it’s in everything from chocolate and instant noodles to lipstick and margarine, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

The problem with razing old growth jungle and forest is that it doesn’t just grow back. They’re extremely delicate ecosystems that have arrived at a natural balance over thousands of years, with every species of animal and plant contributing something vital to the vibrant tapestry of life the jungles host and support. You can’t just plant trees and usher animals to a new home. It would take hundreds of years for those new jungles to even superficially resemble the lifegiving old growth jungle.

There are heartbreaking images of shocked orangutans sitting in the ruins of their former homes, with nothing but the stumps of trees and dozer-trodden vegetation as far as the eye can see.

Those are the lucky ones. The loggers who work for massive multinational corporations aren’t bound by rules or ethics, and they won’t wait for animals to clear out before they destroy. They often shoot orangutans on sight regardless of whether the animals are carrying young.

Baby boot camp — Roux, a baby orangutan in a “boot camp” for orphans, learns how to walk. Credit: Phys.org

That’s the primary reason why Borneo and Sumatra are now home to entire academies for orangutan orphans, who spend at least eight years learning how to fend for themselves with the help of specialists who teach lessons that would normally be taught by the orphan orangutans’ mothers. They include the very basics, like how to move and climb through the jungle, as well as crucial information such as which berries to avoid while foraging.

While there’s no “academy” for clouded leopards and the felids are more adept at avoiding human wrecking crews, they’ve suffered the same fate as orangutans when it comes to dwindling jungles.

This is the situation Sunda clouded leopards find themselves in, so when a trail camera recently captured footage of a mother and her two cubs, conservationists were thrilled.

The footage comes from camera traps belonging to the Orangutan Foundation, and it’s the first time anyone’s managed to obtain video of the Bornean clouded leopards with cubs in tow. The brief video shows the little family bounding through the jungle. They quickly move past the camera, but not before one of the cubs stops to look right at it with typical kitten curiosity.

Sunda clouded leopards are extraordinary cats. Size-wise, they are firmly in the “medium size wildcat” category, with males weighing about 50 pounds. Despite that, they are members of pantherinae, the genus of big cats, having diverged from a common ancestor shared with tigers, leopards, lions and jaguars.

As further proof of their in-between status, Sunda clouded leopards can neither purr nor roar. Typically, each species of felid can do one or the other. Even the species’ scientific nomenclature, neofelis nebulosa, references its intermediate status. (If you encounter alternate taxonomy for them, it’s because the clouded leopards of Borneo and Sumatra are considered distinct subspecies.)

“Due to a different bone structure in their neck, the clouded leopard cannot roar like the larger cats, but also cannot purr because it lacks the fully ossified hyoid bone that allows small cats this ability,” the Smithsonian National Zoo’s keepers explain.

Sunda clouded leopards have several unique adaptations that allow them to thrive in arboreal environments. Their massive tails act as crucial counterweights, allowing them to traverse branches high above the ground without falling. Their paws and paw pads are specialized for gripping tree branches, and their ankles can articulate in ways other felid ankles cannot, allowing the jungle-dwelling wildcats to descend from trees head-first.

Domestic cats infamously lack this adaptation, which is why firefighters are also part-time cat rescuers, coaxing the terrified little ones down from trees, utility poles and rooftops.

The clouded leopards of Borneo and Sumatra are also undeniably cute. People have noticed, which is why one of Google’s auto-complete suggestions for Sunda clouded leopard suggests the word “pet” as an addition. It’s okay to fantasize about having a clouded leopard buddy, but in addition to the fact that they are endangered, they’re also wild animals.

Consider the fact that across the estimated 200,000 years of our species’ existence, homo sapiens have domesticated precisely one felid species, and even that’s not entirely accurate. Felis catus played just as much of a role — and arguably more — than humans did in their own domestication. As predators and obligate carnivores, they are unique among domestic animals, and it took and equally unique set of circumstances to bring cat and man together.

Instead of lamenting the fact that Sunda clouded leopards can’t be pets, we can admire them in the best way possible, from a distance, while helping ensure the survival of this extraordinary, distinctive species by donating to groups like Panthera, the WWF and Global Conservation.

Previously:

Amazing Cats: The Mysterious Marbled Cat
Amazing Cats: The Rusty-Spotted Cat
Amazing Cats: ‘He Who Kills With One Bound’
Amazing Cats: The Puma

‘Best Video Of A Lynx We’ve Ever Captured’: Wild Cat Shows Off For Camera

The trail camera is operated by a team studying the behavior of wolves, but this felid became the main character for a short while, posing majestically right in front of the lens.

Happy Monday! We’re starting the week off in style with an amazing video courtesy of the Voyageurs Wolf Project.

As its name implies, the project is a collaboration between wildlife biologists, ecologists and academics to learn more about wolves, specifically how they survive in the summer months.

While there’s a wealth of research on the behavior of wolves during winter, the pack animals go their separate ways in the warm weather to raise newborn cubs and hunt smaller prey.

Because it’s much more difficult to track individual wolves under the cover of heavy brush compared to following entire packs in the snow, the project relies on a combination of GPS collars and trail cameras. The latter pick up all sorts of wildlife in the Minnesota wilderness, which is how the Voyageurs Wolf Project captured this clear, close-up footage of a stunning medium size wild cat:

We captured some really neat footage of lynx this past year on our cameras but this is definitely the coolest. In fact, might be the best video of a lynx we have ever captured, not least because the lynx decided sit right in front of the camera…

Thanks to the Minnesota… pic.twitter.com/vcrFk0MlNn
— Voyageurs Wolf Project (@VoyaWolfProject) July 31, 2024

That’s lynx canadensis, better known as the Canadian lynx, and the footage is so perfect it’s as if the wild cat said “Ah, a trail camera! I’m gonna sit right here and let the humans see how beautiful and regal I am!”

From its pronounced ear tufts to its snow-soft fur and dark stump of a tail, this lynx is a fantastic example of its species. Canadian lynx are well adapted to the demands of their environs in Canada and the northern US, with heavy coats and soft, wide feet that allow it to traverse snowy landscapes quickly and silently.

They’re famously elusive and difficult to track in the wild, but maybe all we have to do is give the lynx a chance to strut its stuff.

Top image credit Carlos Delgado/Wikimedia Commons.

Coyote Repeatedly Slams Into Screen Door To Get At Cat, Plus: What If Air Conditioning Isn’t Enough?

With much of the US already sweltering under a summer heat dome, architectural engineers warn most American buildings aren’t designed for extreme temperatures, while energy experts warn of more rolling blackouts.

A family in Mission Viejo, Calif., heard a series of loud crashes at their back door, then reviewed their doorbell camera footage to find a determined coyote had been trying to attack their cat.

The footage shows the coyote repeatedly throwing itself at the screen door, which might have buckled if there hadn’t been a baby gate reinforcing it.

“We ended up putting a baby gate up to keep the cats inside,” homeowner Cindy Stalnaker told KABC. “That ended up being what prevented the coyote from getting inside the house because that’s what he was banging into repeatedly.”

Coyotes weigh about 30 to 35 pounds and will attack potential prey smaller than they are, which includes pets as well as young children.

The canids aren’t usually keen on approaching human homes, but in many places they’ve run out of room to roam as towns and cities clear more wild land for new developments. Less habitat means less prey, which can also lead the animals to scavenge and hunt on the fringes of residential and urban neighborhoods.

Stalnaker said she was grateful the baby gate held, but she’s looking into a more stable and permanent solution to keep her cats safe from coyotes.

What if air conditioning isn’t enough?

Human activity isn’t just driving wild animals to extinction, it’s killing them off with temperature extremes, and a Tuesday story from The Guardian provides a bleak look at how our present situation threatens human life as well: Buildings in most US cities aren’t built to mitigate excess heat, air conditioners weren’t designed to keep on chugging indefinitely with temperatures around 100 degrees, and power grids can’t keep up with the demand when millions of AC units are drawing power simultaneously.

At the same time, summers keep getting hotter and there’s no reprieve in sight.

Kids playing in water from a fire hydrant — Legal or not, New Yorkers turn to fire hydrants to get relief during heat waves. Credit: NYC Office of Emergency Management

While the heat has major ramifications for animals and sea life, it’s also directly endangering human life now:

“Some experts have begun to warn of the looming threat of a “Heat Katrina” – a mass-casualty heat event. A study published last year that modeled heatwave-related blackouts in different cities showed that a two-day blackout in Phoenix could lead to the deaths of more than 12,000 people.”

An architectural engineer tells the newspaper that temperatures have spiked so much in recent summers that cooling “systems that we sold 10 years ago are not able to keep up with the weather we have.”

The result for people in America’s hottest cities is that even AC doesn’t provide relief.

In the meantime we’re likely to see more headlines about rolling blackouts, punishing energy bills and people dying in their homes, scientists say. Fusion power and significant leaps in battery technology can’t come soon enough.

Elephants Call Each Other By Name, Study Says

Elephants encode names and other information in low-frequency rumbles that can be heard miles away. For social animals who live in large herds, it’s crucial to be able to address individuals.

Elephants are famously social animals, moving in matriarchal herds that can consist of as many as 70 of their kind.

They also communicate over long distances, emitting rumbles that can be heard miles away.

Because of their social and nomadic existence, it makes sense that elephants would need a way to single out individuals and address each other, and for the first time researchers say they’ve found evidence of Earth’s largest land animals calling each other by name.

“If you’re looking after a large family, you’ve got to be able to say, ‘Hey, Virginia, get over here!’” Duke University ecologist Stuart Pimm told the Associated Press.

The research involved field work and analysis using artificial intelligence. To record samples of elephants communicating, teams followed herds with recording equipment. Notably, elephant rumbles include sounds in frequencies lower than the human ear can detect.

large elephants near lake — Credit: Pixabay/Pexels

The team paid close attention when one elephant vocalized and another responded, and recorded who initiated each rumble and who it was meant for.

Although elephants are best known for making loud “trumpeting” sounds, experts say those are more like exclamations while rumbles contain encoded information that African savanna elephants would need to communicate to each other.

“The rumbles themselves are highly structurally variable,” said Mickey Pardo, a biologist from Cornell University and co-author of the study. “There’s quite a lot of variation in their acoustic structure.”

A machine learning algorithm was then used to sort and categorize the large number of audio samples, looking for patterns that are difficult for human minds to detect.

“Elephants are incredibly social, always talking and touching each other — this naming is probably one of the things that underpins their ability to communicate to individuals,” said George Wittemyer, an ecologist at Colorado State University and co-author of the study. “We just cracked open the door a bit to the elephant mind.”

A female elephant with her young offspring in Kenya. Credit: Pixabay/Pexels

Notably, the elephant “names” are identifiers that they created for themselves, and are not the kind of human-bestowed names that cats and dogs respond to. The list of animals who have names for themselves is short, although likely to expand with further study. Dolphins, for instance, identify themselves with unique whistling patterns, and parrots have a similar method, but both species address individuals by imitating their calls. Elephants use their name analogs the way humans do, to directly address each other.

The research has the potential to raise public awareness of elephant intelligence and their plight as they face threats to their continued existence. Like almost all of the Earth’s iconic megafauna, elephants will become extinct if we don’t do a better job protecting them and ending the ivory trade. Every year about 20,000 elephants are slaughtered for their tusks to feed the demand for ivory, especially in China where it’s considered a status symbol, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Yang Feng Glan, known as the”Queen of Ivory,” was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a Tanzanian court in 2019. Yang smuggled some 860 elephant tusks worth $6.5 million from Tanzania to China as the leader of one of the world’s most extensive poaching and ivory smuggling organizations.

During her years operating the smuggling ring, Yang presented herself as a successful businesswoman and ran in elite circles within China, authorities said. Two of her accomplices were also given 15-year sentences for their roles, but since then others have filled the vacuum left by Fang’s conviction, and elephant preserves are constantly under threat from heavily armed poachers.

Tribe Discovers Ancient Three-Toed Cat’s Fossilized Footprint Deep In Forest

The strange footprint may date back as far as 35 million years ago, according to a preliminary analysis.

Before house cats, tigers and lions, before sabretooth cats and their scimitar-toothed relatives, Pseudaelurus (pseudo-cat) stalked the forests and plains of Europe, Asia and North America between eight and 20 million years ago.

Before Pseudaelurus, Proailurus — an animal whose name literally means “before cats” — stalked the Earth beginning 30 million years in the past.

Proailurus was thought to be the earliest true feliform ancestor, but now there may be evidence of a felid or feliform animal that predates both Proailurus and Pseudaelurus. Feliform is a term that encompasses cat-like creatures both extinct and extant, from familiar felines to civets and mongoose.

Deep in South India’s Nallamala Forest, near one of the country’s largest tiger reserves, members of the aboriginal Chenchu tribe found a fossil that could put the cat lineage back even further.

The fossil is well-preserved and clearly defined, made by an animal whose paw was about the size of an adult man’s hand. It bears a striking resemblance to tiger pug marks, but perhaps the most striking feature is its three toes.

Feliform fossil — The recently discovered fossil. Credit: Times of India

“Based on the distinctive characteristics of the sandstone, identified as the Cuddapah subgroup Quartzitic sandstone, the estimated rock’s age is approximately 35 million years,” archaeologist Arun Vasireddy told the Times of India. “It was around this time that sandstones were formed and it is likely that the animal would have cast its prints.”

Biologists have had to reshuffle their picture of felid lineage many times over the past century and a half as new discoveries uncover previously unknown species of cats and cat-like creatures. Since they first appeared, cats have taken hundreds of different forms with significant variations in size, appearance, hunting methods and preferred terrain.

The experts aren’t popping the champagne yet. There’s a lot more work to do before they can declare a newly-discovered species or even offer more than educated guesses about its niche and appearance.

Nallamala Forest may yet hold more secrets, and research teams will look for additional prints as well as potential remains. It’s a process that will unfold over years and decades, perhaps even longer.

Still, it’s a tantalizing clue about the past and the origin of some of Earth’s most iconic animals.

In the meantime, Vasireddy said, “nothing can be said clearly until further research.”