The species has webbed feet and lives in some of the most remote regions in the world.
The flat-headed cat is one of the most elusive and rare felines in the world, and for three decades conservationists thought it had died out in Thailand, leaving only a handful of places where the species still eked out an existence.
Now there’s good news: the tiny feline, which weighs about half as much as a house cat, has been spotted in a remote region of the country.
Camera traps set up for an ecological survey starting last year detected flat-headed cats 29 times in Thailand’s Princess Sirindhorn Wildlife Sanctuary, according to the country’s Department of Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation. One of the sightings was a female and her cub, an encouraging sign that shows the local population is breeding.
Credit: Jim Sanderson/Wikimedia Commons
The sanctuary covers five square kilometers of rainforest and peat swamps. Along with the flat-headed cat and several unique species of birds, it’s also home to the endangered hairy-nosed otter.
Conservationists believe about 2,500 flat-headed cats remain in the wild. The species is mostly nocturnal and has webbed feet, helping the tiny wildcats navigate mangrove swamps and rivers in its rainforest habitat. Known as Prionailurus planiceps in scientific nomenclature, the flat-headed cat is most closely related to the fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus), which also has webbed feet, and the leopard cat.
Finding evidence of the endangered feline in Thailand is “exciting, yet concerning at the same time,” said Kaset Sutasha of Kasetsart University.
That’s because it means the surviving population is severely fragmented, which makes it more difficult for the cats to breed and could lead to genetic bottlenecks.
But Atthapol Charoenchansa, director general of Thailand’s parks department, also called it a “significant win” for conservation efforts. Knowledge of its presence in Thailand provides more opportunity to study the rare felines to better understand their behavior and protect them from extinction.
Jaguars, pumas, ocelots and margays are able to thrive in the same jungles, a unique arrangement that sheds light on how each species lives.
The jungles of Guatemala are teeming with life.
The guttural calls of howler monkeys haunt the rainforest from above, where scarlet macaws hop branches in flashes of red, yellow and blue.
On the forest floor opossums, peccaries, and oversize rodents called pacas move through dense brush, occasionally picked out by the few shafts of light able to break through the canopy. Ocellated turkeys plumed in iridescent copper and emerald advertise themselves to potential mates with thumping sounds, while spider monkeys perch on the weathered stones of long-forgotten Mayan cities that were swallowed by the jungle centuries ago.
As in most tropics, the apex predators are cats — four different species, to be exact. Jaguars sit at the top, unchallenged. Pumas, close in size if not ferocity, also find sustenance in the rainforest alongside ocelots and margays.
Margays are smaller than house cats and resemble tiny ocelots. They’re outstanding climbers, expert hunters, and spend most of their time in trees. Unlike most cat species, which are crepuscular, margays are nocturnal. Credit: Clement Bardot/Wikimedia Commons
How do four medium carnivorous species exist side by side?
By dividing time, space and items on the menu, according to a new study.
Ocelots are extremely adaptable: they’re excellent climbers and swimmers, and can thrive in various environments. Credit: Victor Landaeta/Pexels
The felids hunt at different levels of the jungle at different times of day, and while there’s overlap between prey, each species has its own distinct diet, according to a research team from Oregon State University. Their paper, Niche partitioning among neotropical felids, was published earlier this month in the Journal of Animal Ecology.
As the big kids on the block, jaguars primarily eat peccaries (pig-like ungulates that weigh up to 88 pounds), armadillos, deer and, sadly, ocelots. Apparently membership in Club Felid does not grant the smaller wildcats a pass. Ocelots top out at about 35 pounds, while the largest jaguars weigh in at about 350 pounds, making the smaller cats easy prey.
Pumas opportunistically prey on peccaries and brocket deer, but the majority of their diet is composed of monkeys, both spider and howler. Ocelots and margays naturally go for smaller prey, sticking mostly to rodents and opossums.
As the largest and most powerful cats in the western hemisphere, jaguars are the apex predators of their environment. Credit: Atlantic Ambience/Pexels
While jaguars hunt on the ground and have a well-documented habit of slipping into the water to prey on caiman and crocodiles, pumas, ocelots and margays take advantage of their climbing abilities and lighter frames to reach arboreal prey. That allows pumas, for example, to snag monkeys and arboreal opossum species from the canopy, so they don’t have to compete with jaguars.
The team verified the “spatial, temporal, and dietary niche partitioning” within the Maya Biosphere Reserve by using ground camera traps, arboreal camera traps and fecal samples, which allowed them to confirm the prey each species has been consuming.
Interestingly, margays are the pickiest — or perhaps most limited — of the bunch, preying on only seven species, while the other three cats regularly hunt between 20 and 27 different kinds of animals.
The information gleaned from the study not only helps researchers understand how these species interact with their environment, but also can help guide conservation decisions to safeguard them against extinction.
Pumas, also known as cougars and mountain lions, are adaptable and elusive. Credit: Catherine Harding Wiltshire/Pexels
Photographer Angel Hidalgo thought the color was a trail camera malfunction until he saw the incredible feline for himself.
For the first time in history, a white Iberian lynx has been photographed.
A Spanish man who works in a factory by day and photographs wildlife as a hobby was behind the camera for the unprecedented shots.
It wasn’t easy.
Angel Hidalgo told National Geographic that first spotted fleeting images of the extraordinarily rare feline on one of his camera traps, but he was skeptical.
“I couldn’t believe it,” the 29-year-old said. “I thought it was a camera effect, and from then on, I dedicated myself to the search for the lynx. I’m still in shock.”
While hiking in late October, Hidalgo saw the “ghost cat” with his own eyes and quickly took a handful of shots and a short video before the cat vanished.
Credit: Angel Hidalgo
The Iberian lynx, as its name indicates, is native to Spain and a small range in Portugal. The cats call mountain ranges like Sierra Morena and Montes de Toledo home.
The white color morph is due to leucism, not albinism: the difference is the former causes only partial loss of pigmentation, and the eyes are unaffected.
In the video footage, the cat sits calmly and regards Hidalgo for about 15 seconds before blinking and turning its head. It’s a fleeting but fascinating look at an animal that most of us will never have the opportunity to see in the flesh.
Hidalgo won’t say where he encountered the white lynx, which is a smart move in an age when bored rich kids in places like Dubai can throw money at wildlife poachers and help themselves to the rarest and most vulnerable wildlife.
Because they know the authorities in their countries won’t bother them, the sons of oil oligarchs and emirs openly flaunt their wild “pet” collections: Instagram and TikTok host thousands of photos and videos of young men and women posing with cheetahs, lions and tigers, with the cats often riding shotgun in hypercars from Lamborghini, Ferrari and McLaren.
We hope the location remains a secret for the sake of the wild cat and because the Iberian lynx is a conservation success story. The species was on the brink of extinction in the 1990s and now has a healthy breeding population that numbers in the thousands.
Free-ranging cats do have a negative impact on wildlife, but we’re not going to solve the problem by demonizing them and culling them by the millions.
The Literary Hub story starts off with a provocative question: what if cats ruled the world?
This is a question I find amusing to ponder, so instantly my mind was filled with images of cats scandalizing foreign heads of state by insouciantly swiping gifts off tables, angering diplomats by yawning and nodding off during summits, and financing the construction of massive and unnecessary coastal walls, on the off chance the ocean decides to move inland and get them wet.
Then the writer cited the repeatedly-debunked “study” that credulous media of all stripes still reference without bothering to read the text — that infamous 2013 Nature Communications paper, published by birders who author books with titles like “Cat Wars: The Consequences Of A Cuddly Killer.”
Some journalists don’t know any better, some are overworked, and some are frankly too lazy to read the study with a critical eye, but I think one of the more likely reasons people continue to cite the paper is because it’s easier to blame felinekind for wildlife extirpation than it is to admit we’re the primary culprits. After all, according to the WWF’s most recent annual review, we’ve killed off 73 percent of Earth’s wildlife since 1970, and we certainly didn’t need house cats to help us push elephants, rhinos, every species of higher non-human primate, and innumerable other species to the brink of extinction.
We did that. We did it with our relentless development, consuming and fracturing wild habitats. We did it with careless industrialization, by dumping chemicals and garbage into our rivers and lakes until more than half of them were rendered too polluted to swim in or drink from. We did it by bulldozing old growth forest and jungle, by exploiting species for fur, folk medicine, ivory, sport hunting and in the illegal wildlife trade.
Cheetahs are critically endangered, and they’re being driven to extinction even faster by poachers, who sell them to wealthy buyers in oil-rich gulf states where they’re trendy pets. Credit: Riccardo Parretti/Pexels
More than 47,000 species — that we know of — are headed toward extinction. It’s so much easier to blame it on anyone or anything else than admit we need to make major changes to our lifestyles and policies.
But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what Alley Cat Allies has to say about the 2013 meta-analysis and its derivative papers:
“The Smithsonian-funded study published in Nature Communications is not rigorous science. It is a literature review that surveys a variety of unrelated, older studies and concocts a highly speculative conclusion that suits the researchers’ seemingly desperate anti-cat agenda. This speculative research is highly dangerous. It is being used by opponents of outdoor cats and Trap-Neuter-Return (including the authors) to further an agenda to kill more cats and roll back decades of progress on TNR. And it is being spread unchecked by the media.“
Here’s what a group of ethicists and anthropologists wrote about the claims against cats in the journal Conservation Biology, lamenting the lack of nuance and danger in arguing that cats must be stopped “by any means necessary.” The drive to blame felines, they argue, has “fueled an unwarranted moral panic over cats”:
“Contrary to Loss and Marra’s claims that the scientific consensus is consistent with their views that cats are a global threat to biodiversity, the actual scientific consensus is that cats can, in certain contexts, have suppressive population-level effects on some other species (Twardek et al. 2017). This is something that is true of all predators, native or not (Wallach et al. 2010). Thus, cats should not be profiled as a general threat a priori and without reference to important factors of ecological context, situational factors, clear definition of harms, and evidence thereof.”
“There are there are serious reasons to suspect the reliability of the new, extreme cat-killer statistics,” wrote Barbara J. King, retired chairwoman of the department of anthropology at The College of William and Mary.
Feline predatory impact varies by local conditions. Free-ranging cats in cities and suburbs kill rodents, but have minimal impact on other animals, data shows. Credit: Patricia Luquet/Pexels
Like we’ve often noted here on PITB, the authors of the Nature Communications study can’t even say how many free-ranging felines exist in the US. They say it’s between 20 and 120 million. That’s a 100 million difference in the potential cat population! How can they tell us how many birds and mammals are killed by cats if they can’t even tell us how many cats there are? No amount of massaging the numbers can provide an accurate picture if the initial data is shaky or nonexistent.
Furthermore, the nature of a meta-analysis means the authors depend on earlier studies for estimates on predatory impact, but the 2013 Nature Communications paper does not include any data —not a single study — on feline predatory impact. In other words, they have no idea how many animals free-ranging cats actually kill.
In authentic studies that actually do measure predatory impact, the data varies widely in geographic and demographic context. Data derived from the D.C. Cat Count, for example, shows that cats living more than 800 feet from forested areas rarely kill wildlife, and are much more likely to kill rodents.
Those who cite the bunk study and its derivatives are “demonizing cats with shaky statistics,” King wrote, adding she was alarmed by “an unsettling degree of uncertainty in the study’s key numbers.”
Free-roaming populations are reduced when cat colonies are managed, and the animals are fed and fixed. Credit: Mia X/Pexels
Ultimately, we agree with Wayne Pacelle, former president of the Humane Society of the United States.
The meta-analysis authors “have thrown out a provocative number for cat predation totals, and their piece has been published in a highly credible publication, but they admit the study has many deficiencies. We don’t quarrel with the conclusion that the impact is big, but the numbers are informed guesswork.”
Cats do have a negative impact on wildlife, it varies according to local circumstances, and those of us who love cats have a responsibility to keep our pets indoors and help manage free-ranging populations.
But cooler heads must prevail, approaches to managing cats must be evidence-based, and the effort requires people of all kinds working together — which becomes much more difficult when agenda-driven pseudoacademics whip people into a frenzy by portraying felines as bloodthirsty, invasive monsters who need to be wiped out “by any means necessary.”
Solving the problem of free-ranging cats requires us to own up to our own role in species extinction and to take measured, evidence-based steps to protect vulnerable wildlife. Otherwise, we’re inflicting a whole lot of suffering on sentient creatures and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
Today’s a good day to do something special for your little pal(s), and to help spread awareness that felines are sentient, intelligent animals with feelings.
Happy International Cat Day!
Today marks the 23rd annual observance of the special day, which was established by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a nonprofit originally founded in the late 1960s to stop the commercial hunting of seals off Canada’s coasts.
Buddy sits on his vanquished foe, an alien xenomorph. “I don’t understand how these things gave humans so much trouble,” he said.
In more than half a century since, the group has expanded to an international operation with projects aimed at improving conditions for wild and domestic animals. They do wildlife rescue, rehabilitation, preserve management and more.
International Cat Day was intended to help raise awareness about cats, their behaviors and the best ways to interact with them and give them good homes.
For those of us who are already wrapped around the paws of our feline overlords, it’s an occasion to do something extra for our buddies. Here at Casa de Buddy, that means spending more time with little man, giving him catnip, and his favorite human food treat: cheese.
The thing that matters most to him is Buddy Time, when we hang out, play games with his wand toys, and eventually he snuggles up in my lap.
We hope all of you are enjoying International Cat Day and have the opportunity to spend some extra time with your furry pal(s) today. For all they do to improve our lives, a little expression of gratitude is the least we can do.
Pain In The Bud 