TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Deep in the lush Yungas forest of Bolivia, there lives a spotted cat on the smaller side of house cat, with rounded ears and long whiskers. For years, locals called it tilcayo, but on Thursday, it was revealed that the cat is a new species previously unknown to science.
Under the journal Current Biology, researchers named the newly identified species Leopardus tilcayo, in honor of its local nickname. The cat was found in Bolivia's mountainous region, where forests are often covered by cloud and surrounded by high humidity, according to the researchers, as quoted from NBC News.
This is the first discovery of a new living feline species in more than a century.
The cat is part of the tiger cat group, under the Leopardus genus, commonly found in South and Central America. They are what researcher Jonas Lescroart of the University of Antwerp said are "cryptic species," meaning it is difficult to distinguish them by appearance alone. Jonas is the co-lead author of the new study that also suggested there are in fact five species of tiger cats, including tilcayo.
“We never expected this Bolivian tiger cat to be a separate species, and no one had ever proposed it as a different animal, subspecies or otherwise,” Lescroart said," as quoted from The Guardian.
The researchers also found a new tiger cat subspecies in Peru's Yungas region, naming it Leopardus tigrinus antisuyo. The name derives from the Antisuyu region of the old Inca empire.
Little Is Known About Tilcayo Tiger Cat
The Bolivian tiger cat measures about 46 centimeters, weighing around 1.4 kilograms. “Its fur is light brown … with irregularly shaped rosettes across its body,” according to Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, one of the authors of the study and a National Geographic explorer.
But little is known about the cat's biology and lifestyle. According to Nogales-Ascarrunz, who is also from Bolivia, remains of small rodents in scat samples give some hints about Tilcayo's diets. Meanwhile, camera-trap evidence suggests the cats are more active at night.
“Our information at this moment is limited to the two live individuals that we examined, and a small number of camera-trap records,” said Lescroart.
Nogales-Ascarrunz echoed the sentiment, stating that "so many basic things" about the newly discovered tiger cats "are not known," including how they reproduce and many facets of their daily lives.
It is also not known how many Tilcayo tiger cats live in the wild. “We need science, we need more studies to answer this question," said Nogales-Ascarrunz.
Tilyaco Lives in Sanctuary
One of the live tilcayo cats lives in a local wildlife sanctuary, which sparked the study. Citing National Geographic, Nogales-Ascarrunz received a call about "a weird cat," who had been living with a local man before he realized it was clearly a wild animal instead of a domestic breed.
“I saw this cat. It was really, really small, and I couldn’t believe how small it was,” Nogales-Ascarrunz said. “I thought it was a kitten.”
Nogales-Ascarrunz was "fascinated" by the cat. Colleagues at the sanctuary suggested that the animal could be a Brazilian tiger cat, but she wasn't convinced. "If you look at the spots or the tail, they really don’t match,” she said.
It would take years before she teamed up with Lescroart and Eduardo Eizirik, a geneticist at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, to place the cat in its distinct part of the feline tree.
The team compared complete genomes from 38 individuals across the Leopardus genus and found that not only was Tilcayo different from the other tiger cat species, it diverged from them about 1.4 million years ago. National Geographic described the evolutionary distance to be comparable to that between modern lions and extinct cave lions.
Discovery Is the First Step to Conservation
The discovery of the species is just the first foray into conservation efforts, as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list tracks tiger cats as two “vulnerable” species with declining populations, according to The Guardian.
Co-researcher Dr Caroline Sartor, of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford, said the discovery would be crucial to conservation efforts since it's impossible to protect a species without knowing where it lives or what it even is.
Meanwhile, Eizirik said one of the key factors to establish a species’ conservation status is its geographic distribution. “If you think [the tiger cat] is a single thing from southern Brazil all the way to Costa Rica, you’re going to find it’s not endangered,” says Eizirik. “But if we find that it’s not a single thing, but actually five things, each of them must be assessed separately.”
The researchers of this study have shared their findings with IUCN, which will assess the five lineages separately. This is critical, as the Yungas is one of the region's most threatened ecosystems, facing deforestation, agricultural expansion, human-caused fires and mining.
Read: 10 Most Endangered Species in Indonesia and Why They Are at Risk
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