New Bolivian cat claws its way into species list: What we meow

A new species of wildcat, discovered in Bolivia, has been formally identified after the accidental discovery of a lost kitten and nearly 10 years of painstaking research.

The Leopardus tilcayo, which local people in the Bolivian Yungas, a band of cloud forest which runs along the eastern slope of the Andes, were aware of, was previously thought to be related to other wildcats in the region.
What has been announced?
A study published in Current Biology this week has announced the first new cat species to be discovered in more than 100 years. The last was the pampas cat, reported in 1923.

Scientists have named the new cat Leopardus tilcayo, after the local Bolivian name for the animal.

The Leopardus tilcayo has been found living in the Bolivian Yungas, a band of cloud forest which runs along the eastern slope of the Andes, forming a transitional zone between the high mountains and the Amazon basin. This is a rugged, humid and largely under-studied ecoregion, which spreads into Peru and northern Argentina, although so far the tilcayo has only been genetically confirmed in Bolivia.

Researchers don’t yet know whether the species is confined to a single pocket of this forest or spread more widely across it.

Jonas Lescroart, a researcher at the University of Antwerp and coauthor of the study, said such a discovery is rare for the cat family. New species are sometimes “declared” when older scientific names are reinstated after genetic research shows a population was wrongly grouped with another species. That happened with the clouded tiger cat two years ago and the southern tiger cat, Leopardus guttulus, in 2013.
“It had never been given a scientific name, and it had never been formally described in a scientific way that was published,” Lescroart told Al Jazeera. “So we had the honour of coming up with a name for this animal and doing the formal scientific description.”
How was the cat found?
A local man found a kitten alone near the forest and, mistaking it for a stray domestic cat, brought it home to care for it. It lived with his family for about a year until 2016 when its wild instincts became impossible to ignore, and it started chasing the neighbours’ chickens.

Once the family could no longer manage the cat themselves, they surrendered it to Senda Verde, a refuge for animals. The refuge called in biologist and lead scientist of the Bolivian Felids Research Program, Paola Nogales Ascarrunz, telling her they had found a “weird cat”.

“Unfortunately, that’s the problem with the illegal wildlife trade,” Nogales Ascarrunz, told Al Jazeera. “When you want to pet a wild animal, then you think the power of love is going to change the behaviour of this animal. But a wild animal, it doesn’t matter if you give him the best food, it’s not going to behave.”

She added that this kind of case is common in Bolivia, particularly in the aftermath of wildfires, when orphaned young animals are captured and sold into the illegal pet trade before eventually being surrendered once new owners realise they can’t be kept.

When she went to see the for herself, she says she found an animal with a small, scrunched face, short round ears, long whiskers, and covered in leopard-like spots – but clearly too large and too wild to be a domestic cat.

Initially, she believed it was a Leopardus tigrinus, or tigrina, a small spotted cat found across much of Central and South America.

But, she says, something about the size and shape of the cat’s spots bothered her. It would take nearly a decade, a genetics collaboration spanning three countries, and DNA pulled from century-old museum skulls to prove she was right to be suspicious.

Perhaps leopards can’t change their spots but apparently, you can discover a new Leopardus with new spots altogether.

How was it found to be a new species?
While Nogales Ascarrunz was puzzling over her “weird cat” in Bolivia, an entirely separate effort was under way to study tiger cats across the continent.