Eastern ocelot cat
| Eastern ocelot cat | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Leopardus emiliae | ||||||||||||
| ( Thomas , 1914) |
The Eastern Ocelot Cat ( Leopardus emiliae ) is a South American species of cat . It is one of the smallest South American cats and is closely related to the northern tiger cat ( Leopardus tigrinus ) and the southern tiger cat ( Leopardus guttulus ). It occurs south of the lower Amazon in the Brazilian states of Pará , Tocantins , Maranhão , Ceará , Rio Grande do Norte , Paraíba , Pernambuco , Alagoas , Bahia and Goiás and is the only species of cat found only in Brazil.
features
The cat reaches a head-torso length of 41.5 to 51 cm, has a 26 to 32 cm long tail and weighs 1.27 to 3.5 kg. The hind foot length is 105 to 116 mm and the ears are 37 to 52 mm long. The fur is relatively rough. The basic color on the back and on the sides of the body is light yellow, gray-yellow or a very light yellow-brown. The ventral side is whitish, a very light gray or slightly yellowish with some small or medium-sized dark spots. On the sides of the body there are small, round, dark rosettes that do not unite to form strips. The edges of the rosettes are thin and usually interrupted. Some specimens show black stripes that run from the rear center of the back to the base of the tail. Melanistic individuals are so far unknown in the Eastern ocelot.
Way of life
The eastern ocelot cat occurs in four different ecosystems, in the tropical rainforest of the southeastern Amazon basin, in the Atlantic rainforest , in the semi-arid caatinga, and in the savannas of the northern and central cerrado . Their feeding behavior in the wild has not yet been adequately investigated. The stomachs of two females who lived in the Brazilian caatinga contained mostly lizards. The excrement samples from cats that were at home in the semi-arid Caatinga also confirmed the predominance of lizards, and locusts, millipedes, beetles and birds were also found. In this region, rodents apparently only make up a small proportion of the food spectrum, because here the numbers of these small mammals are relatively low. In the caatinga, ocelot cats are more diurnal than in other regions of their range, which explains the relatively high proportion of diurnal lizards in their prey.
Systematics
The Eastern ocelot was first scientifically described in 1914 by the British zoologist Oldfield Thomas under the name Felis emiliae . The type specimen came from Ceará. His colleague John A. Allen assigned the form to the ocelot cat as a subspecies in 1919 and gave it the scientific name Oncifelis guttula emiliae . Cabrera questioned the validity of the taxon in 1958, as Thomas had not compared the shape to specimens from French Guiana, where the terra typica of the ocelot cat is located, and synonymized the ocelot cats of northeastern Brazil with Felis (Leopardus) tigrinus tigrinus , a decision that later authors followed. Because of the different coat coloration and especially after a comparison of the skull morphometry , the eastern ocelot cat got the status of an independent species again in 2017.
supporting documents
- ↑ a b c d Fabio Oliveira do Nascimento & Anderson Feijó: Taxonomic revision of The Tigrina Leopardus tigrinus (Schreber, 1775) species group (carnivora, felidae). Papéis Avulsos de Zoologia - Museu de Zoologia da Universidade de São Paulo, Volume 57 (19): 231-264, 2017, ISSN 0031-1049 PDF
- ↑ Mel Sunquist, Fiona Sunquist: Wild Cats of the World . The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2002, ISBN 0-226-77999-8 , p. 132
- ↑ Allen, JA 1919. Notes on the synonymy and nomenclature of the smaller spotted cats of Tropical America. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 41: 341-419.
- ^ Cabrera, A. 1958. Catalogo de los mamíferos de America del Sur. Revista del Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales “Bernardino Rivadavia”, Ciencias Zoológicas, 4 (1): 1‐307.