by Megan Gannon, News Editor | January 28, 2015
This is one of the first photos of a living African golden cat in the wild. It was taken in Gabon in April 2002.Credit: Courtesy of Panthera
African golden cats are hardly ever photographed in the wild. In their
rare, camera-trap cameos, the cats are usually seen licking their
spotted fur or innocuously inspecting the unfamiliar lens. But recently, scientists captured a much more dynamic scene: a golden cat crashing a party of red colobus monkeys in Uganda.
The video, released yesterday
(Jan. 27), may be the first footage of a golden cat hunting in the
daylight, according to Panthera, the conservation group that released
the video from inside Kibale National Park.
"We know a lot more about golden cats than we did a few years ago, and
yet we still know almost nothing about their behavior," David Mills, a
graduate student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in South
Africa, said in a statement.
"Primatologists in Kibale have observed monkeys emitting alarm calls at
golden cats on several occasions, and considering this latest evidence,
it's not hard to see why."
The video was recorded from a camera trap
set up by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Germany. In the beginning of the clip, a group of adult
red colobus monkeys feeds on the dead wood of a tree stump. The attack
happens suddenly. A cat leaps from the bushes and briefly wrestles with
the monkey slowest to flee. A slow-motion version of the video makes it clear that the cat was unsuccessful; it quickly retreats when it fails to get a fatal hold on its prey.
African golden cats are comparable in size to bobcats. They can weigh
11 to 35 lbs. (5 to 16 kilograms). Red colobus monkeys, which weigh 15
to 27 lbs. (7 to 12 kg),
can put up a good fight against the cats — and they aren't always on
the defensive. Another video released by Panthera shows a group of colobus monkeys harassing a golden cat that's trying to sleep in a tree in Uganda's Kalinzu Forest Reserve.
African golden cats, which are listed as near-threated by the
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), are found in the
forests of central and west Africa. They were photographed for the first
time in the wild in 2002, and once in a while, new footage of the
animals emerges. Two years ago, for example, scientists with the
Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) captured a video of an African golden cat
in Kibale. The researchers said they lured the creature to the camera
trap with Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men. The cologne contains
civetone, which comes from the scent glands of civets, small mammals
that are native to Africa and parts of Asia.
source
No comments:
Post a Comment