Wild cats – Page 6 – Pain In The Bud

Happy Thanksturkey From The Buddies!

There’s a lot to be grateful for.

Before we get into the most important day of the year (according to Bud), I wanted to share that we’ve been watching the wonderful Earth At Night In Color.

The title pretty much sums it up: teams of intrepid videographers went to some of the most remote locations on Earth armed with new camera tech that can peer deep into the night, revealing an entire world we can’t see and colors we don’t have names for.

The result is astonishingly crisp and clear images of the nocturnal world, offering opportunities to see things we’ve never glimpsed.

Earth At Night In Color — It might be difficult to belive, but this image was shot at night near the banks of the Amazon with only starlight providing minimal illumination.

One episode, Jaguar Jungle, follows a six-year-old male named Juru whose kingdom is an idyllic stretch of the Amazon River where capybaras frolic and caiman are plentiful.

Serendipitously, the crew also encounters a young female jaguar in heat, following the scent trail of a male and calling out. The resulting courtship is fascinating and in the words of narrator Tom Hiddleston, “surprisingly tender.” It’s exactly the sort of thing that would have been impossible to film with regular or even night vision cameras.

Another episode, Puma Mountain, follows a cub on the cusp of adulthood as she learns to survive in Patagonia. The vistas are remarkable in a virtually untouched land far from human light pollution, where wildlife thrives and the glowing ribbon of the Milky Way straddles the horizons at night.

I appreciated the focus on pumas, who are often overlooked in wildlife documentaries, and Earth At Night is perfect for them since the vast majority of their activity happens in the overnight hours.

The series also has episodes dedicated to lions and cheetahs, so there’s lots here for cat lovers. Other highlights include episodes following African elephants, polar bears and tarsiers, which are liliputian primates that look almost like Jim Henson creations.

Aqua!

I move quite a bit when I’m sleeping, and since Bud literally drapes himself over me, you’d think he’d be used to it. I must have shocked him awake with a sudden movement a few nights ago, because he bolted up, freaked out and yelled “AQUA!”

I busted out laughing despite him catching my leg with a claw when he was startled. Then I rubbed his head to let him know all was well, and we went back to sleep dreaming of oceans.

The Great Day of Turkey

Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s good to have a day dedicated to being grateful, and I think that’s especially important in an era of hyper-commercialism, when the accidentally fortunate use Instagram to rub their wealth in other people’s faces, dueling billionaires vie for political influence and the adoration of the public, and most people conflate what they have with who they are.

My family has banned talk of politics this year, which I think is the smart and mature thing to do.

As for Bud, he’ll have to endure most of the day on his own before I come home with his favorite food in the universe.

I hope everyone out there has a great Thanksgiving and gets to spend it with family and/or friends.

Paleontologists Recover Shockingly Intact Saber-Toothed Kitten Buried For 35,000 Years

The find is extraordinary, allowing scientists to directly study the extinct cat’s musculature, fur, head shape, and even its claws and whiskers.

A team in Russia stumbled on the find of the century when they located the stunningly well-preserved remains of a saber-toothed kitten in Siberia.

The kitten, which was found near the Badyarikha River in northeastern Siberia, was about three weeks old when it died, scientists estimate.

Unlike typical finds — a fang here, a mandible or partial skeleton there — this specimen still had its fur, claws, whiskers and muscles, which means scientists have already learned more about the species, Homotherium latidens, than they have with almost any other long-extinct animal.

homotheriumpawpads — Images of the extinct cub’s paws compared to (D), the paw of a 3-week-old lion cub pictured on the bottom right. The Homotherium paw is thicker but less elongated. Credit: Borissiak Paleontological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

While the saber-toothed cub is a true felid, it boasts adaptations unlike any surviving member of the panthera genus.

It has wide paws wrapped in heavy fur, a short tail and a stockier, lower-to-the-ground build than modern lions and tigers. Those adaptations, scientists believe, made it easier for Homotherium latidens to traverse environments with ice and heavy snow.

Its head shape is slightly different, with smaller ears than modern big cats, and its neck is enormous, more than twice as thick as the neck of a comparable three-week-old lion cub which was used for comparison. Likewise, its mouth is capable of opening significantly wider, although the team did not compare it to the jaguar, which has the widest-opening jaw among extant felids.

Homotherium cub — A photograph of the cub, top, and a scan revealing facial, ear and neck structure, below. Credit: Borissiak Paleontological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

The frigid, arid clime of Siberia made it possible for the cub’s body to endure for so long. The team that made the discovery conducted radiocarbon dating that puts the cat at between 35,000 and 37,000 years old, according to reports.

It’s not clear how the cub died, although its species went extinct about 10,000 years ago, likely as a direct result of fewer prey animals in the frigid zones it occupied. Additional bones belonging to the rear of the cub skeleton were encased in a large cube of ice immediately next to the intact upper body.

The cub’s remains were recovered in 2020, but the results of the research team’s analysis were just released on Nov. 14 and published in the journal Nature. The paper’s authors have a lot more to share about the species’ physical characteristics, they noted in the text, and plan to follow up soon with a second paper going into more detail about what they learned from the cat’s intact musculature.

Top image: An artist’s impression of an adult member of homotherium.

Recent News Stories Claim People Have Spotted A Type Of Cat That Doesn’t Exist

It’s easy to mistake house cats for larger wildcats when photos and videos are blurry and lack familiar items to establish a sense of scale. The same phenomenon is responsible for UFO sightings and cryptid creatures like the Loch Ness Monster.

Recently several reports have been making a big deal about blurry videos of black cats, claiming they’re “black mountain lions” or “black panthers” roaming in places like Missouri and Louisiana.

The footage of the first video was shot in Missouri, where pumas once ranged, were extirpated in the 20th century, and have returned in small numbers in recent decades. Like most photos and videos of cryptid or unidentified animals, this one is blurry, taken from a distance, and lacks any object near the animal to provide a sense of scale. The second video is simply a black house cat with her kitten in rural Louisiana.

Our brains are pattern recognition machines and when the information we’re looking for — be it spatial, detail or contextual data — isn’t present, our minds tend to fill in the gaps. That’s the reason why we see faces in clouds, creatures in shadows, men on the moon and the Virgin Mary on grilled cheese sandwiches. (The technical term for “perception imposing meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus” is “pareidolia,” from the Greek for “instead of” and “image.”)

Compounding the problem is the fact that the word “panther” is one of the most confusing of felid descriptors, a word that vaguely refers to physically large cats but doesn’t refer to any particular species, coat pattern or color.

Photo by adrian vieriu on Pexels.com

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Photo by Caleb Falkenhagen on Pexels.com

Big cats can be voids too, like this stunning black jaguar in Scotland’s Edinburgh Zoo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Above: A jaguar, a leopard, a puma (mountain lion) and a melanistic jaguar. Although jaguars and leopards look nearly identical, jaguars are stocker with thicker limbs and have blotches inside their rosettes, while leopards do not.

The word panther can refer to a puma, a jaguar or a leopard, but only the latter two species can have melanistic (black) coats.

Contrary to popular belief, even a black cat’s fur is not entirely black — you can still see the rosettes and spots of their coat patterns up close and in certain light conditions.

blackjaguar — This jaguar’s rosettes and spots are visible in direct light. Jaguars in the wild are rarely seen so close or in “perfect” conditions, making it difficult to see coat markings of melanistic members of the species. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

However, jaguars don’t range in Missouri, leopards are not native to the Americas, and if someone indeed spotted one of the very rare pumas in Missouri, it could not be black because melanistic pumas do not exist.

Mountain lions (Puma concolor in taxonomic nomenclature) are physically large and are the second-biggest cats by size and weight in the western hemisphere after jaguars, but they are not technically “big cats” because they are not part of the pantherinae subfamily. Pumas cannot roar like big cats, but they’re capable of the classic wildcat “scream,” and they can even meow like small cats.

By process of elimination — and the cat’s physical shape — we can conclude the Missouri video shows a house cat that looks larger because there’s nothing nearby to give us a sense of scale.

Grilled cheese Virgin Mary — This piece of a grilled cheese sandwich sold for $28,000 on eBay in 2004 because bidders believed the Virgin Mary’s face miraculously appeared on it. Credit: eBay

It may seem unlikely that someone confuses a house cat, which weighs an average of 10 pounds, with a puma, which weighs on average more than 100 pounds, with the largest males pushing 220 pounds.

But it happens all the time even in close encounters, like the incident this summer in which a man riding a dirt bike swore he was ambushed by a puma only for DNA to establish beyond doubt that his attacker was a domestic kitty. For what it’s worth, he still swears it was a mountain lion.

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Amazing Cats: The Adorable Colocolo, Feline Of The Pampas

With a perpetual kitten-like appearance and mismatched coat patterns, colocolos may look like the product of AI or Photoshop, but these little ones are very real — and very feisty.

We’re heading back into obscure territory with this edition of Amazing Cats, focusing on a little-known species that ekes out an existence in the forests and plains of South America.

The colocolo, also known as the Pampas cat, superficially resembles the familiar house cat, but a closer look reveals some striking differences.

Colocolos are small, about the same size and weight as felis catus, but their tails can be quite a bit shorter and extremely fluffy.

Colocolo full — Colocolos have pattern and color combinations seen only in their species. This one has rosettes on his body and tabby stripes on his limbs and tail. Some colocolos have thick tails with tabby-like rings, while others have bushy tails more commonly associated with long haired domestic cat breeds.

There are at least five variations of fur color and pattern, ranging from marbled to jaguaresque rosettes and, most strikingly, a seemingly mismatched pattern in which the legs have dark stripes over rusty/cinnamon-colored fur, which contrasts dramatically with the gray, gold, silver or tan of their bodies. The overall effect makes some colocolos look like they’ve been photoshopped, or assembled from spare parts.

Some colocolos appear to have solid-color coats which are actually an agouti pattern with barely visible bands of slightly darker fur.

While the species may look stocky, conservationists say it’s smaller than it appears, with its fur making up the majority of its “bulk.”

Colocolo color variant — This photo might look like a fake, but it’s a documented combination of coat pattern and color among colocolos.

As if that wasn’t enough to distinguish them, Pampas cats have neotenous features that give them an even stronger kittenlike appearance compared to house cats and comparable species like the rusty spotted cat.

In other words, they’re very cute and looking at them can trigger the same protective instincts we feel when we see kittens and cute adult cats. But don’t let their disarming features deceive you — these little guys are not cuddly, don’t respond well to people who get close, and will turn aggressive if you encroach on their space.

Cute colocolo — This adorable colocolo appears to be giving the side-eye to someone. Note the slight suggestion of the classic tabby “M” on the forehead.

While they’re alternately called the Pampas cat, the word “colocolo” comes from the language of the Mapuche, an indigenous group that lived in lands that are parts of modern day Chile and Argentina.

In the Mapuche language, Colo Colo was the name of a Mapuche warrior who led his people in their resistance against Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century, but it’s also the name of an evil rat-like creature in Mapuche folklore. It’s not clear how a feline came to bear the name, but the species — leopardus colocolo — is often called gato colocolo to distinguish between the historical figure and the modern-day Chilean football club, Colo-Colo.

Although they’re associated with the pampa, the flatlands in and around Peru best known for the mysterious Nazca lines, colocolo are adaptable and thrive in forests, jungles, wetlands, and mountain ranges like the Andes, among other terrain.

Their range stretches from Argentina in the south through Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, western Brazil and an isolated population in Uruguay.

Despite their relatively wide distribution and variety of habitat, colocolos are not well understood. Experts still haven’t settled the question of whether they’re all one species or whether subgroups qualify as their own subspecies. Their hunting habits are not well-documented, although it’s known they prefer small rodents, and there is ongoing debate about whether they are crepuscular, like most felid species, or nocturnal.

Colocolo share a continent with jaguars, pumas, ocelot, jaguarundi, margay, oncilla, kodkod, Geoffrey’s cat and the Andean cat, and the fact that they live in the deep wilderness makes them more difficult to study.

Because their coloration and coat patterns can vary so widely, Pampas cats are often mistaken for other small wildcats living in South America, and people unfamiliar with their species sometimes mistake them for domestic felines.

They’re also very rare in zoos, with only one US zoo (Cincinnati) counting them among their exhibits, and only four Pampas cats in captivity worldwide. (Excluding private captivity by poachers and illegal wildlife traders.)

Like virtually every species of wildcat, the colocolo’s numbers are declining due to a number of factors, primarily human activity like habitat destruction, sport hunting and development cutting populations off from each other.

The more people are aware of these beautiful and little-known felines, the better their chances for long term survival as conservation groups receive more donations to help protect them, and lawmakers are pressured to protect the wilderness where they live.

Yawning colocolo — Like all cats, colocolos appreciate the value of a nice nap.

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

Amazing Cats: The Sunda Clouded Leopard

Like, OMG! This Kitty And Puma Are Totes Besties!

Plus: The awesome and terrifying cats and proto-cats of prehistory!

OMG, you guys! No cap, you gotta totally check out this adorbz video of a sweet widdle kitty witty becoming best fwiends with this mountain lion!

Phoebe the cat sees this cute AF puma near the back door of her home, curiously looking inside. It’s love at first sight as kitty and kitty see each other! Per Parade Pets:

“[T]he kitty in this TikTok video is completely fascinated by the big kitty outside her window. There’s no getting her away from her new friend!

On Sunday, August 25, @cricketandstrawfl shared this footage of her Tuxedo Cat posted up at the back door in their house, where a cougar was hanging out. It goes without saying that the cougar in question was many times bigger than Phoebe, but that didn’t seem to scare her at all.

It seemed like the cougar was pretty curious, too. He didn’t appear to be aggressive; instead, he was staring at Phoebe and gently pawing at the glass, trying to figure out who the tiny cat in the window was.”

OMG-hee! Look at the big kitty gently pawing at the door! He wants to give the little kitty a huggy-wuggy!

@cricketandstrawfl

Phoebe making forest friends 🐆 🌲 🐈‍⬛ #wildlife #kitten #cougar #mountainlion #animals #puma #catsoftiktok #cat #catlover #wildanimals #animallover #pnw #westcoast #yyj #vancouverisland #bc #canada #wildlifephotography

♬ Funny – Gold-Tiger

SO ADORBZ! The puma pawing at the door wasn’t testing its strength to see if he could snag a quick meal, those were totes signals of love! Teehee!

Felid predators of pre-history: They will eat you

If you’re in need of a palate cleanser after all that sugar, the BBC’s Discover Wildlife has a rundown of prehistoric cats and their particularly fascinating proto-cat ancestors, some of whom looked more classically cat-like than several species of true cats. Isn’t convergent evolution cool?

There’s the famous smilodon, the saber-toothed cat, xenosmilus, the so-called shark-toothed cat, and homotherium, the scimitar-toothed cat. Outdoing each other with increasingly sword-like teeth was apparently a big thing in the felid world back then.

There’s also the cave lion, the last of the UK’s big cats, and miracinonyx, the American cheetah, but did you know that simbakubwa, the “great lion” of Africa, topped out at almost 3,000 pounds?

Dinictus — Dinictis looked like a cat, behaved like a cat and hunted like a cat, but was not part of the felidae family. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Simbakubwa and dinictis were examples of “false cats.” That is to say, they were not part of the felid lineage, but closely resembled cats in body plan and behavior through convergent evolution. Nature found a niche, and several different species filled it for a time.

Dinictis in particular looks strikingly like modern big cats, which makes it even more surprising to learn it’s not part of the genetic lineage of the felid line.

Finally — or firstly — there’s proailurus, the first cat or “dawn cat,” from which all true felidae species can trace their lineage. Appearing almost 31 million years ago proailurus enjoyed napping, climbing trees and eating Temptations. Okay, we made that last part up. But still. If proailurus were around today, it would probably go just as crazy for the kitty crack as our house panthers do.

Top image via Youtube.