It’s a familiar sight to cat owners: You walk into the room to discover that your furry friend has climbed onto the dining room table in search of food. Something similar has now been captured by camera traps in South America: a wild puma (Puma concolor) has been spotted much higher in the rainforest canopy than it is normally thought to climb. The story is reported in a new preprint paper from a team led by France’s National Museum of Natural History. The larger the cat, the more likely it will prefer a life on the ground. Lions and tigers are burly, which is great for dominating large prey on the ground, but not particularly conducive to climbing. That’s not to say they never do, but on the rare occasion you can see a lion or tiger high up in a tree, they usually stick to the thick, lower branches that can support their weight. Leopards are the most prolific tree climbers of the cat family, often hiding their prey in the treetops to hide it from scavengers. Some evidence suggests that they might sometimes hunt tree-dwelling prey while there, but this is rarely documented.” Therefore, questions arise about the interactions between top ground-dwelling predators and their [canopy-dwelling] prey,” the researchers write. “Are the latter really safe from climbing the big cats in the forest canopy? How high can top predators climb to the tops of trees? feet) above the ground, the camera was much higher than most wild cat species are typically seen. Just before 8:30 pm on September 24, 2023, an adult female kinkajou appeared on camera, with a juvenile at her side. The pair were only visible for about 10 seconds, before jumping over the camera and out of sight. 2026) About 20 minutes later, at 8:49 pm, a mountain lion appears from the darkness, stalking along the same branch. He stops to sniff some places where the kinkajous had been and appears to be trying to find the trail; The predator spends the next 15 minutes prowling back and forth along the branch and investigating the area. Finally, at 9:06 p.m., the cougar slinks back. arrived and disappears into the night. There is no way to know what happened next, as the end of the story took place off-screen. But either way, a kinkajou watching this video would surely feel the same way we would if we saw security camera footage of an unknown intruder moving around our house in the middle of the night. It is believed that life in the treetops helps animals like this avoid the dangerous predators that hunt below. If there is any relief to be found for the kinkajou population, it is that this was the only interaction between a cat and its potential prey captured on camera among nearly 40,000 individual “events” seen over a decade of observations. The goal of the camera trap project wasn’t to see how high mountain lions and other cats can go; According to the researchers of the new paper, it was to “identify and quantify frugivorous mammals and birds that visit nutmeg fruit trees.” But no scientist worth his salt would turn down an additional finding, especially an interaction as rare as this one. The research has not yet been peer-reviewed or published, but is currently available as a preprint on the bioRxiv server. ScienceAlert stories are written, fact-checked and edited by humans, never generated by AI. Never miss a story, subscribe here. Related news
