Pantanal Pampas Cat
| Pantanal Pampas Cat | ||||||||||||
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Drawing of Leopardus braccatus from Popular Science (1897) |
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Leopardus braccatus | ||||||||||||
| ( Cope , 1889) |
The Pantanal pampas cat ( Leopardus braccatus ) (English: Pantanal cat or Brazilian pampas cat) is a small cat from the genus of the pardle cats , which occurs in savannas and other open landscapes in central South America. Their distribution area extends from the southwest of the Brazilian state of Piauí over the Cerrado to the Pantanal and also includes Paraguay , east of the Río Paraguay , the lowlands of the Bolivian department of Beni and the province of Formosa in northern Argentina.
features
The Pantanal Pampas cat is medium-sized with an average head-trunk length of 52 to 56 centimeters and a tail length of 23 to 33 centimeters. It is therefore smaller than the closely related pampas cat ( Leopardus colocola ).
The Pantanal Pampas cat has a brownish base color. The sides of the body are provided with indistinct sloping, slightly darker brown lines. These lines are more pronounced in young animals and fade in adults. The back line is dark brown to black. The lower jaw and the area below the nose are white or light yellow-brown. The feet are blackish, the tail is evenly brownish without ringlets and has a black tip. There are also melanistic , completely black specimens.
Way of life
Little information is available about the way of life of the species. It occurs in open landscapes and, like other small cat species, feeds on rodents like other small cats, and its food spectrum is supplemented by small lizards and birds.
Systematics
The species was scientifically described for the first time shortly before his death by the American scientist Edward Drinker Cope under the name Felis braccata . For a long time it was considered a subspecies of the Pampas cat. The Spanish zoologist Rosa García-Perea divided the pampas cat into three species in 1994 ( Lynchailurus braccatus , L. colocolo and L. pajeros ) and gave them the generic name Lynchailurus , which was introduced by the Russian naturalist Nikolai Severtzov . In 1999, Johnson and colleagues were unable to understand the species separation in a molecular biological study of small cats in South America. Although they found clusters within the examined samples of the Pampas cats, which show the closer relationship of regionally close groups of cats, these did not coincide with the species described by García-Perea. The division into three species was adopted in the Mammal Species of the World , a standard work on mammalogy published in 2005, but the three species were placed in the genus of leopard cats ( Leopardus ). In addition to the nominate form , the subspecies Leopardus braccata munoai from Uruguay and southern Brazil was mentioned, today an independent species. In the Handbook of the Mammals of the World , another standard work whose predator book appeared in 2009, Leopardus braccatus was again listed as a subspecies of the Pampas cat assigned and also the specialist group of the international environmental protection association ( IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Specialist Group ) leads L. c. braccatus as a subspecies of the Pampas cat, emphasized in a revision of the cat system published in 2017 that some subspecies of the Pampas cat could receive the status of independent species in the future after further investigations. In a revision of the Pampas cat group published in June 2020, the species status of Leopardus braccatus was finally confirmed after five clades were found in the Pampas cat group , which differ in their skull morphology, coat color and genome and which also have different distribution areas. In central Brazil, hybrids can occur between the Pantanal pampas and the northern tiger ( Leopardus tigrinus ) . Representatives of both species mate with each other and produce young animals.
literature
- Barstow, Anita & Leslie, David. (2012). Leopardus braccatus (Carnivora: Felidae). Mammalian species. 44. DOI: 10.1644 / 891.1
supporting documents
- ↑ a b c Fabio Oliveira do Nascimento, Jilong Cheng and Anderson Feijó (2020). Taxonomic revision of the pampas cat Leopardus colocola complex (Carnivora: Felidae): an integrative approach. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, XX, 1-37, doi: 10.1093 / zoolinnean / zlaa043
- ^ A b Rosa García-Perea: The Pampas Cat Group (Genus Lynchailurus Severtzov, 1858) (Carnivora: Felidae), a Systematic and Biogeographic Review. American Museum Novitates 3096, 1994; Pp. 1-36.
- ^ Edward Drinker Cope (1889): On the Mammalia obtained by the naturalist exploring expedition to southern Brazil . The American Naturalist 23: 128-150.
- ↑ a b Warren E. Johnson, Jill Pecon Slattery, Eduardo Eizirik, Jae-Heup Kim, Marilyn Menotti Raymond, Cristian Bonacic, Richard Cambre, Peter Crawshaw, Adauto Nunes, Héctor N. Seuánez, Miguael Angelo Martins Moreira, Kevin L. Seymour , Faiçal Simon, William Swansson, Stephen J. O'Brien: Disparate phylogeographic patterns of molecular genetic variation in four closely related South American small cat species. Molecular Ecology 8, 1999: S79-S94, doi: 10.1046 / j.1365-294X.1999.00796.x .
- ↑ Don E. Wilson & DeeAnn M. Reeder (Eds.): Leopardus in Mammal Species of the World. A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference (3rd ed).
- ↑ http://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=87
- ↑ Leopardus colocolo in the endangered Red List species the IUCN 2008. Posted by:. T. de Oliveira et al, 2008. Accessed January 24, 2009.
- ↑ Kitchener AC, Breitenmoser-Würsten Ch., Eizirik E., Gentry A., Werdelin L., Wilting A., Yamaguchi N., Abramov AV, Christiansen P., Driscoll C., Duckworth JW, Johnson W., Luo S. .-J., Meijaard E., O'Donoghue P., Sanderson J., Seymour K., Bruford M., Groves C., Hoffmann M., Nowell K., Timmons Z. & Tobe S. 2017. A revised taxonomy of the Felidae. The final report of the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group. Cat News Special Issue 11, 80 pp.