News to me that this species is at said collection - any photographs you can upload?
In search of rare cat species
- Thread starter tigergem
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News to me that this species is at said collection - any photographs you can upload?
I remember a few years ago someone had proposed splitting pampas cat into three (or was it four) species. That I thought was decided to be invalid and they were kept as one species. Now we are up to possibly five! It's hard to keep track.
Darwin Lopez
Member
I uploaded before on this thread
In search of rare cat species
There are two rescued females at the National Zoo in Santiago, Chile. I saw them back in July
With all the crappy mammal taxonomy papers coming out over the past years, finally someone that really takes a proper approach, the paper leaves some small questionmarks that can hopefully be resolved soon (e.g. low posterior probabilities of the main nodes in the phylogenetic tree based on dna samples).
The three species split was all but accepted until the IUCN released their utterly bizarre felid taxonomy update which lumped them all back into each other and same way they lumped all mainland tiger subspecies in with each other while still claiming some are different
It was only a matter of time before new papers came out countering their results.
~Thylo
@Darwin Lopez I know they received some rescued pampas cats and guignas, but I thought they were off exhibit. Are they now on public display?
Darwin Lopez
Member
The kodkod was released back into the wild, however the two Pampas cat sisters can not be released as they were raised by humans and then rescued. So they are now part of the permanent exhibition. You can find a little more about them in this video (sadly not english translation)
There is a private facility called "Fauna Andina" in Villarrica, Chile with eight kodkods (including melanistic form).
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@Darwin Lopez The video is great - thank you. I speak Spanish fairly well and was able to follow most of it. (Interestingly the narrator's accent - which I assume is typical of Chile - sounds closer to the Castillian Spanish of Spain than the Mexican Spanish I am used to).
I am familiar with Fauna Andina holding and breeding guigna, though it is my understanding they are generally closed to the public. However if I go to Chile - which I hope to do in two years for a puma safari near Torres del Paine - then maybe I will see if there is a way to arrange a visit.
I am familiar with Fauna Andina holding and breeding guigna, though it is my understanding they are generally closed to the public. However if I go to Chile - which I hope to do in two years for a puma safari near Torres del Paine - then maybe I will see if there is a way to arrange a visit.
Onychorhynchus coronatus
Well-Known Member
Very interesting ! Thank you for sharing !
Leopardus braccatus is the species most commonly ( though that isn't the right word as they are not at all common) seen in Brazilian zoos.
Darwin Lopez
Member
Yes, I will go to Brazil to see Leopardus braccatus. Do you know any zoo that is currently holding this cat. I know there is one zoo in Uruguay holding Leopardus munoai . Don't know about Leopardus pajeros.
Onychorhynchus coronatus
Well-Known Member
Yes , actually several zoos here hold this beautiful cat species.
On public view in Sao Paulo state at Sorocaba zoo there is a pair, in Minas Gerais you have a pair in Belo Horizonte zoo and in Goiás State you have a number of them kept at the Brasilia zoo.
Not zoos and not open to the public , but it is also worth mentioning that there are some really beautiful individuals of this species kept at private conservation centres both in Sao Paulo State. These are the Brazilian feline conservation centre in Jundiaí city and Sao Paulo zoos CECFAU centre (sadly strictly closed to public) just outside of Sorocaba city.
As I've said above the feline centre isn't open to the public but just send the centre an email and they will definitely allow you to visit and see these cats which have recently had kittens (which will probably be fully grown by the time of your future visit to Brazil).
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I mean some are striped and others are spotted so I'd say they are pretty jarringly different looking. Regardless, both wildcat and leopard cats have been split into multiple species, and the latter will surely be split further as more research in down into exactly how different the Amur "sub"species is from the rest of the population.
~Thylo
If you think these two cats don't look particularly different from one another, I suggest you need to visit an optician
or perhaps Barnard Castle.
Onychorhynchus coronatus
Well-Known Member
If you think these two cats don't look particularly different from one another, I suggest you need to visit an optician
Very well said Dave !
Amur Leopard Cats being a likely split keeps getting repeated on here, but it is based on them being visually distinctive, which in turn is because the visual comparison being made is only between southeast Asian animals and Amur animals - they are opposite ends of a climatic cline, the same as Malaysian and Siberian Tigers or Leopards.
The split into Mainland and Sunda species by IUCN was primarily from a 2017 paper ("Genetic Structure and Phylogeography of the Leopard Cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) Inferred from Mitochondrial Genomes") which was from mtDNA and, although the two lineages were extremely divided, the authors were hesitant in saying this was a definite case for a split (into two species) - indeed, within the paper they retained Leopard Cats as a single species, simply reducing the number of overall subspecies down to four (interesting side-note, the Philippine populations fall completely within Bornean samples suggesting they were introduced to the Philippines by humans).
Within the mainland lineage there are four groupings, one of which is the Amur Leopard Cat's group of the far east (including the Tsushima and Iriomote cats). The other three groups merge together whereas the far-eastern group is distinct from the other three, but it is still such a relatively small difference that it seems unlikely they are separate species (the paper gives an estimated divergence time of only 60,000 years - compare to the estimated divergence of the Mainland and Sunda lineages of c.1,000,000 years).
I'm comfortable with the Mainland vs Sunda split, my only (listing) concern being with Peninsular Malaysia which reveals samples from both lineages. The paper suggests this is due to the Toba super-eruption of 73,000 years ago causing the local extinction of Leopard Cats on the peninsula, and they have since recolonised from both north and south. Accepting the split into two species makes it impossible for me to know which (or both) I have seen on the peninsula. There is evidence of hybridisation between the lineages on the peninsula, and this is the reason the authors of the paper declined to elevate the two lineages to separate species.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing the study results!
I could of sworn I'd read around here that testing showed that the Amur Leopard Cat is genetically more distinct to Fishing Cats than to the Indochinese populations, but perhaps I'm misremembering something?
~Thylo
Well, the lumping of Siberian Tiger into the same subspecies of Malayan Tiger wasn't because they were found to represent a cline
it was basically because all the mainland races share a common ancestor more recently than the Sundaic ones, but they were unwilling to split the Sundaic races into a distinct species as they did the Leopard Cat and (earlier) the Clouded Leopard. The IUCN paper itself noted that Amur was an evolutionarily significant unit, but nonetheless insisted that as it diverged more recently than Sumatran (and they were treating Sumatran as a mere subspecies) they had to lump it with all the others.However, the papers in question were quite contradictory on this point
stating in some areas that Palawan were introduced and other populations were probably natural, in others that the other populations were introduced and Palawan were probably natural, and in others again that all were introduced......
My post had nothing to do with lumping subspecies of tigers. I was referring to species.Well, the lumping of Siberian Tiger into the same subspecies of Malayan Tiger wasn't because they were found to represent a cline
Which "papers"? I know the IUCN one about felid taxonomy made some conflicting typos between text versus diagrams or charts but that was very clearly explainable by human error.However, the papers in question were quite contradictory on this point
However, Palawan was (probably) connected to Borneo when sea-levels were lower but the other islands on which Leopard Cats occur never were, which comfortably explains that the former island could have a natural population but that the latter islands would probably need human introductions to account for having populations with the same genetics.