It's not that it's prey (small mammals and birds) aren't very smart, it's more that the cat is that good. Cats are incredibly well adapted predators, this one is just scaled down more than most. It's an apex predator. That apex just happens to be a a bit lower than for most cats...
If you're a mouse or small bird, this cat is basically the HR Giger/Ripley Alien come to life.
It is not remotely an apex predator. Nothing that small could possibly be an apex predator.
Success rate is completely irrelevant, that’s not what apex predator means. An apex predator is an animal with no natural predators of their own. Any animal that small has natural predators, and therefore a mix of predator and prey instincts.
Lions, tigers, polar and grizzly bears, wolves are all apex predators. Small cats and humans are not (bears, crocodilians, and bull sharks are all natural predators of humans.)
It’s a difficult thing to calculate but it’s estimated that Jaguars and Cheetahs have the highest success rate of big cats, ranging from 40%-55%. Cheetahs attack smaller prey and can usually outrun them. Jaguars are ultimate ambush predators (for big cats) since they can pounce from trees and their spots provide great camouflage.
Larger cats like lions and tigers have lower success rates (although the Wikipedia ranges are WILD) that are typically below 20%, but they hunt bigger game, where they can feed on one carcass for a while. Lions also prefer to simply chase off other predators to steal their kills. They love to steal cheetah kills (cheetahs are super passive in general). Leopards will hide their kills in trees to prevent lions from stealing them.
Domestic house cats are about 30%. Wolves are about 20%. Bears have very low success rates, even polar bears. This due to their size. Folks have mentioned dragonflies and harbour porpoises, but it’s widely considered that Orcas are the ultimate predators, comparable to humans, but different orca groups eat different things so it’s impossible to look at hunting success with them.
An effective, specialised predator like a Peregrine Falcon has a success rate of about 25% - although that's mitigated somewhat as its targets (birds on the wing) are fast moving.
I thought it was the ridiculously fluffy Mongolian cat that had the best kill rate among cats, but either way it's hilarious that it's these cute small cats!
thanks for the info! but I mean, understandable tbh. it took one image for me to definitely not be interested despite liking the comic and cartoon a lot as a child
Wait I just read an article about this and this is missing the funniest part. This family kept the cat after they found it on some rural road- it was so small and skinny for a regular cat they felt bad for it and brought it home. Over the course of a year, it was always trying to hunt their neighbor’s chickens and making distinctly not-housecat noises so they eventually were like, “I think we just have a wild animal in our house possibly?” And they brought it in lol
In South America there was a fox species that had been fully domesticated and kept as pets, then when the Spain arrived they were completely wiped out.
Hell you don’t even have to go back to ancient people for wacky pets. A buddy of mine is a history buff and was showing me this video from the Russian Japan war back in 1905 because I wasn’t aware of it prior. To keep it short, Russia tried to sail to Japan and ended up going all the way around Africa, to boost moral the captain let them stop in Madagascar and bring 1 pet on board. These included a parrot that would only speak in Russian curses, venomous snakes, a chameleon they kept losing for obvious reasons, and a fucking gator lmao.
By mistaking British fishing boats in the English channel for Japanese torpedo boats and engaging them (not actually a completely horrible idea, as the British were supplying most of the Japanese navy, so them shipping a bunch of sailors to pick up the boats and setting an ambush in the English channel wasn't impossible, just incredibly improbable; the worst thing is this was the third time the mistake had happened, first with a Russian messenger boat, and again in the straight of Denmark). This resulted in the British almost going to war with the Russians, before settling on merely banning them from using the Suez Canal, forcing them to go the long way around Africa.
Now, the reason they were sending a fleet from the Baltic to Japan was because the Japanese had trapped the Russian Pacific Fleet in Port Arthur, and this fleet was being sent to relieve them.
The British blocked Russia from using the Suez Canal because they were allies with Japan at the time. Voyage took over 7 months and had comical levels of fucking up. Def worth a listen on YouTube if you’re bored.
It's in La Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia. By pure coincidence, I was there myself a couple of weeks ago and the animals are really well looked after.
Do you think that these labs which use animals are just rounding up random felines of which they know nothing about the genetic history?
Lab animals are bred to be lab animals. Their life purpose was chosen for them before they were even conceived.
This isn’t a post in support of animal testing, I’m just pointing out the realities of how this works. Maybe knowing that there’s zero chance this random new cat species is just sitting in a lab now will make you feel better?
That's what they do with a lot of smaller primates. Wild-caught primates like long-tailed macaques are often passed off as captive-bred, and due to supply issues, researches are incentivised not to question their sources too heavily
I could see them doing tests on it because it's a new species, for the explicit purpose of learning about and documenting the new species, but I would think it would be housed in a sanctuary habitat or something.
That's how I read the comment about the lab, at least.
ETA: People are really stretching my words. By "tests" I mean studying it's behavior, documenting it's weight and looks, drawing blood for analysis, watching how it ages and seeing how long it lives (assuming it can't be released into the wild now). I have personally been inside an animal toxicology lab when I worked in pharma, I'm aware of how animal testing works. I was in no way insinuatin that these kinds of things would ever happen to this random wild cat. Please just calm down, read the words I actually wrote, and try to refrain from making up things that you imagine I wrote. Thanks.
There are probably new species being discovered and overlooked every day just because the people discovering them aren't deeply familiar with the particular animal in question.
I don't know much about beetles, so unless it's neon pink with purple polka dots or has some other extremely eye-catching feature, a new species of beetle could show up in my garden every day, and I'm probably just going to ignore it.
I'm fairly sceptical of the unaddressed sampling biases in that paper. They note that basing the entire study on 4 genera is not ideal and may not be representative, but no consideration is given to the fact that their criteria for selection necessarily limits them to a group of sufficiently low complexity that their parasitic relationships could have been fully studied.
As a genus is typically quite limited in size but the number of extra-generic hosts of an associated parasitoid is not, you would expect the genera with sufficiently complete records to be the ones with abnormally specialist parasitoids, such that completing the record is easier.
Or to put it simpler: by only counting parasitoids with well known hosts towards the P:H ratios they're necessarily excluding any parasitoids with so many hosts that them all being well-known is not feasible. This will systematically inflate their numbers, and it's virtually impossible to know by how much.
It's an interesting argument for further research, but that sampling bias is such a major flaw with the statistical approach that I can't take it as a meaningful repudiation of the established knowledge.
There are more species of beetles than there are anything else as far as we are aware. Considering many species can only be identified by their internal reproductive organs I myself have given up identifying certain arthropods because my need for identification stops at having to dissect them. I ok with being not that deeply familiar.
The marbled crayfish is only known to exist wild in Europe, Madagascar, South Korea, and Taiwan. However since it's from a North American genus, it's believed it was collected as aquarium pets and were later released, and therefor are invasive. Its native range is completely unknown.
I went to a cheetah rescue in South Africa a few years ago and they had some other types of cats; including one I am forgetting the name of that apparently is declining in numbers because they look so much like a house cat that people bring them home as pets thinking they are stray housecats and they breed with housecats so the purebred (whatever endangered cat) line is dying out.
Anyway, the creature in question was hiding that day so I didn't get to see them.
Psst, if this kind of thing is interesting to anyone scrolling by, download iNaturalist and upload any decent pictures you can snap of the insects you encounter. Other plants/animals/fungi too, I’m just more familiar with the insect & spider IDers. Other people will log on and narrow down the ID as much as possible, and you will be contributing to scientific knowledge (even if not the discovery of a new species, you’re providing useful info about things like range of the insect that might then be used in research papers or to support more intensive study.)
I am going on memory, but I heard of an experiment where a scientist looked in their own garden and found four new species of beetle, and said that this would be true for pretty much anyone. There are so many species of beetle that we just don't have time to collect them all. Apparently God's beetledex is massive.
YEAH because every time someone asks a question about what type of cat they have/found, all the replies are just “it’s a cat. Le kitty. Felis Catus.” And I mean, they’re not wrong that most cats you find aren’t really of different species or even breeds, but perhaps some occasionally are? 👀
They initially thought it to be a somewhat weird specimen of an other species until a researcher double-checked and found it to be distinct enough to warrant phylogenetic work, which after 7 years lead to the publication of their paper formally describing the new species
How does something like this go undiscovered anyways? Yeah there’s this whole ass species of cat out there that’s been living here for presumably longer than we have and we just didn’t really notice it until now
Worth noting a lot of people don't really understand what this means. This isn't us suddenly finding a bunch of these cats after never seeing one before. It's us realizing they're a distinct species from their lookalike relatives.
Edit: As the comment below points out, science has only found two of these cats so it's not like they're common or anything. New to science, not new to locals. Wording wasn't clear enough on this.
Actually it literally is science finding a cat after never seeing it before. Yes the locals know what it is but scientists? Completely unknown to them. We’ve found 3 total.
They are known to the local population, and they think the cat is entirely unremarkable, so they never mention it to researchers. Scientists local to the area also think they are unremarkable, so they don't make a fuss about it either. It takes an expert on cats who isn't local to notice that the cat is, in fact, remarkable enough to mention it.
A species being discovered is not necessarily the same as an animal being discovered. I would guess that type of cat was probably known to people in the area, so much so that it already had a name, tilcayo. It's more that no researcher had catalogued it and determined it to be reproductively isolated from other species until now.
I'm not advocating domesticating this cat, but it's clearly the Cat Distribution System at its maximum level. (As in, scientifically, we all got to meet this cat.)
Leopardus sp does look pretty of samey. And kittens? A zoo in my state got their bobcat because people found a kitten in the woods and were informed it was a bobcat when they took it to the vet to get spayed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopardus you are right about Leopardus being so similar. I see you got the Pampas-cat-like types, and the Ocelot-like type. And it seems like the Tilcayo is not the first time scientists went "Hm, actually it's maybe a different cat" and DNA tested to find out the truth.
I read that the locals in Bolivia already knew this cat existed for generations, it was "science" that didn't know. So it was less "undiscovered" and more "not officially categorized by scientists".
so many of these animals were well-known to people not living in the western world… it bothers me too when the response is “scientists discovered this!” okay which ones?
It’s not because of the Western World, it was discovered by a Bolivian scientist. It wasn’t considered to be discovered before because it wasn’t properly documented and identified as a separate species
It’s less ‘no one knew this cat was out there, and now scientists discovered it (but really local people knew)’, and more ‘it was well known there’s multiple species of cats like this out there, and scientists now managed to get DNA of one and found it was a seperate species from the known described species’.
Yeah it's less The Big Science is trying to trick us and devalue people's lives, it's just that "A new species of cat what documented by scientists" is a lot less exciting is a headline for news agencies than "A new species of cat was discovered by scientists".
There are bobcat/domestic cat hybrids where I live and that's thought to be impossible. Third generation impossible has been living at my place for more than six years now and she only just passed two pounds in weight. If a cat expert listened to her growl they'd definitely change their minds, lol
“This cat, they call it tilcayo. And when you ask, ‘Does it have some meaning in Quechua or Almyra and other Indigenous languages?’ they say, ‘No, my grandpa told me that’s the tilcayo,’” Nogales-Ascarrunz said. “This is a traditional knowledge that they have in the community. We want to preserve that knowledge and we didn’t want to give it another name.”
Just read that they've had it since 2017, at some point they should've figured out that the kitten isn't growing. But on a serious note, I assume it takes a ton of verification to officially declare a new species.
I mean, could still just be a domestic cat with some kind of genetic condition, i.e. dwarfism.
It's not like all cats are gonna be the same size - our neighbours have two fully grown ones and the is like almost twice as big as the other because the smaller one got very sick for a while as a kitten which stunted his growth.
So while not seeing a kitten grow at all might be surprising, that doesn't mean your first conclusion would necessarily be "well darn, it's gotta be a local species of wild cat hitherto unknown to science".
You’ve gotten the facts mixed up, the normal people who found it as a kitten and tried to raise it thought it was a domestic cat, the scientists at the sanctuary only thought it was a kitten briefly before learning it was an adult.
I am a master of disguise, a compact death machine with ancestry evolved over millennia. I have protected my bloodline and homeland for generations untold. I am a ninja and I....
ooh a kitty! You're coming with me, we'll clean you up good and get you a fuzzy bed!
Absolutely gorgeous. I find this way more handsome than other cats. Also, is it just me or based on the eyes does this guy flip between personable and Mr. DEATH at random times?
great looking animal honestly. always cool when they catalogue new animals in the modern day. shows how much more of that there still is to do. sometimes it feels like we'e just have all the answers then you see something we have low or no information for and the worlds magic really sparkles in that moment.
This is not a new species. This is a known species that through DNA analysis was determined to be 5 different species despite all looking similar. It was not "just discovered on the side of a road". It's as if you took an Asian Elephant, took DNA samples and determined there is a West Asian Elephant and a South Asian Elephant that are different enough to warrant different classifications but are so physically similar that it would not be possible to categorize them as a different species/subspecies without DNA tests.
Can it be bred as a domesticated cat? They're so cute I want one (but would never since they're only just discovered and probably not many around to breed)
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u/qualityvote2 27d ago edited 25d ago
u/dazli69, your post does fit the subreddit!