New Look At Cats! - survey of the world's big cats, and their environmental risks

International Wildlife, March-April, 2000 by Fiona and Mel Sunquist

Scientists have made extraordinary advances in learning how they live and what we must do to save them

A cavernous room in the Sara-wak Natural History Museum bulges with skins, shells and skeletons of creatures collected by long-dead explorers. Saucer-eyed tarsiers, pale moon rats and scruffy stink badgers perch stiffly in glass cases. A giant tree squirrel the size of a Yorkshire terrier hangs from a branch affixed to the wall just above foot-long centipedes and pill bugs as big as golf balls.

In 1992, as part of an informal survey on the status of the world's 36 species of wild cats, we had come to this museum on the island of Borneo to examine the tired remains of one particularly intriguing animal. Its display case was labeled "bay cat." Like pilgrims at a shrine, we peered reverently at a dark, elongated shape--at the time, the only stuffed Bornean bay cat existing anywhere.

In the next few minutes our solemn review of this ancient skin would take an unexpected turn. And in an instant, the bay cat would become a symbol for what humankind has learned about that band of carnivores called the felids, the mostly lithe and slinky hunters that also include the more familiar domestic cat, the tiger and the African lion.

Noticing our excitement, museum director Charles Leh came over. "I've got another one in the freezer. It just came in," he announced. Certain that he must be mistaken, because the last Bornean bay cat specimen had been collected more than half a century ago, we looked at each other in disbelief. One of the rarest mammals in the world, the bay cat was known only from a few crumbling skins collected mainly in the 1800s. No weights, measurements or photographs of the animal existed. So few specimens had ever been found that some scientists doubted it was a real species.

We followed Leh to an adjoining building, where an aging white freezer was wedged between some large crates. And there, on top of a pile of assorted mammals, birds and fish was the frozen carcass of the elusive bay cat.

Just like early biologists who had to depend on appearance to identify a species, we quickly took all the appropriate measurements. But we also had a new tool--one of many that have helped scientists modernize the study of cats and other wildlife in recent years. We sent a tissue sample from the frozen cat to the U.S. National Cancer Institute in Maryland, where Steven O'Brien, a geneticist who has studied DNA in cats, and his colleagues compared the new sample to one taken from the original specimen collected in 1855 by Alfred Russell Wallace, a contemporary of Charles Darwin. Genetic tests showed that the DNA of the two cats was identical, and that the bay cat was indeed a species.

The new specimen added one more bit of information to a growing body of knowledge about the cat family. "A quarter century ago we knew little more than what wild cats looked like and roughly where they lived," says Peter Jackson, chairman of the Cat Specialist Group of the IUCN-- World Conservation Union. "Dedicated explorer-scientists have since uncovered many of the secrets of the cats' lives in the wild."

Twenty-five years ago, the bay cat of Borneo and the kodkod and Andean mountain cat of South America were known only from museum skins and an occasional stuffed specimen. Even easily recognizable species such as bobcat, puma, tiger, leopard, cheetah and ocelot were unstudied, and virtually nothing was known about what they needed in terms of space and food. Today, we have basic information about the biology of most of the 36 cat species.

We have also made tremendous progress in finding ways to save these animals. International trade in spotted cat skins, which once accounted for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of animals, is now prohibited, and biologists are beginning to see signs of recovery in some of the cats, including ocelots and jaguars.

And this is only a beginning. New techniques for collecting information promise to further transform the study of cats in the wild. Big money from major corporations (ExxonMobil, Ford and Ford's subsidiary Jaguar are sinking millions into cat conservation) is helping to fund new research. And innovative solutions to cat depredation on livestock hold out hope that humans and cats can coexist.

The lack of knowledge in previous years stemmed from the fact that cats are active mainly at night and almost impossible to see in the dense vegetation where they usually live. In the 1970s, radiotelemetry-- miniature radio transmitters attached to a collar strapped around an animal's neck--gave biologists their first glimpses into the darkness, turning a spotlight on the previously hidden lives of the secretive, solitary felids. The technique allowed field biologists to find an animal in the densest cover or follow it across the most remote terrain. But telemetry has its drawbacks. Cats have to be trapped and tranquilized to attach the radio collar.

Now scientists using cameras are able to collect information without ever handling a cat. Their new "hands-off" techniques make life easier for the animal and are often better received by landowners and wildlife departments. "It is much easier to get permission to run a line of cameras in the forest than to wade through the permitting process for capturing, tranquilizing and radio collaring," says Ullas Karanth. Karanth, senior scientist in charge of the Wildlife Conservation Society's India program, uses cameras triggered by an infrared beam to estimate tiger numbers.