“Doppelganger” means “double-goer” in German.
English speakers have borrowed the word to describe unrelated people who bear an eerie resemblance to each other.
It can apply to cats as well.
Check out these two feline doppelgangers!
1. Borneo’s bay cat:
2. Latin America’s jaguarundi, seen here in Costa Rica:
Both have solid dark fur, small rounded heads, long bodies, long tails, and shortened legs.
And yet there are major differences:
- The two cats live on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean.
- They come from separate genetic lineages.
- They prefer different habitats, with the bay cat living in forests and the jaguarundi spending most of its time along the edges of fields and in other open areas.
The strong physical resemblance between Asian bay cats and Latin American jaguarundis is probably a case of convergent evolution (explained here using saberteeth as an example).
Outside of a zoo, we’re unlikely to confuse bay cats and jaguarundis — if we’re lucky enough to see one in the wild — because they live in different parts of the world.
This is not the case for another set of small spotted doppelgangers who all share Latin America’s tropics together — oncillas, margays, and ocelots.
The resemblance is so close that Zooniverse has a visual “cheat sheet” to help cam-watchers tell them apart:
See the discussion for details.
However, each little tropical doppelganger has unique features of its own — although it sometimes takes a molecular biologist to see them!
61. Oncillas are part of “an exquisite genetic puzzle.”
That quote is from the Cat Specialist Group, and the puzzle has to do with genetic differences and similarities in members of a group of small Latin American felines known as “tiger cats.”
The differences are mostly academic, and we laypeople have enough to contend with already, but hey! These little wild kitties are adorable:
This video mixes cute visuals with technical narration.
The boffins’ puzzlement is worth a mention because otherwise we would never know that news about the endangered “oncillas,” “northern tiger cats,” and “little spotted cats” is all about the same house-cat-sized wild feline — red-listed as vulnerable to extinction.
By the way, tigers aren’t native to the Americas, and “tiger cat” doesn’t mean that some oncillas have stripes — this name comes from the group’s local moniker, tigrina.
Taxonomists incorporated that Spanish word into the northern tiger cat/oncilla’s scientific name: Leopardus tigrinus.
The southern tiger cat that was identified as a separate species in 2013 is called Leopardus guttulus, a/k/a “now you see it, now you don’t”:
Such names are very important to scientists, who use them to show how cats evolved and in what ways two cats might be related.
The tiger-cat group is hard to label for two reasons:
- Cats (and some other animals) entered South America recently (in geologic terms), which means they are still diversifying quickly as part of an adaptive radiation.
- The species that scientists try so hard to identify today are “freeze frames” of this ongoing process, meaning that they may change significantly before a stable new form appears.
This really complicates a professional cat herder’s job, but the rest of us only need to know that these Fluffy-sized spotted Latin American cats are real-life Riddlers.
Identifying the next two, somewhat larger, tropical doppelgangers is much more challenging for scientists and laypersons alike!
62. Margays are tree specialists, like Asia’s clouded leopards and marbled cats.
But margays don’t have clouds — they have spots and rosettes, as you can see in this video of one hunting on the ground as well as in tree tops:
Its 180-degree ankles allow the cat to walk upside down on branches and come down tree trunks head first! (Clouded leopards and marbled cats are the only other cats that can do this.)
There is a very primitive feel to that video, but according to the fossils found thus far, the first cats could not do this.
Why three modern cats have evolved this feature is anyone’s guess.
The flexible ankle doesn’t make them walk any differently on the ground, so it doesn’t help us identify margays on trail cams — not that these arboreal specialists bother with trails very much.
Experts suspect that margays are rare even up in the canopy, where camera traps are not possible.
If one does show up, they sometimes have difficulty identifying it — margays and ocelots look very much alike.
The accompanying nature preserve note on YouTube: “This trail camera video footage is about determining if this is a Margay cat or an Ocelot cat identification? Trail Camera action catches young ocelot cat or margay cat in trail cam video footage. Camera trap experts and mammal specialists in Costa Rica and Peru agree that it is a Margay Cat. The long swooping tail, slight body, and ‘closed’ rosettes helped confirm this ID.”
Size is a key difference — the largest margay is smaller than the smallest ocelot.
When that isn’t easy to judge, other clues are the margay’s long tail (the better to balance with during acrobatics), its broad and soft paws (again, for balancing and also to provide good traction), and those large, bulging eyes.
Very little is known about these secretive cats that mostly come out at night and keep their distance from H. sapiens.
Their Red List status is Near Threatened, given the fact that margays are forest dependent in a region with high rates of deforestation, and also because margays are few and far between even after factoring in the ocelot effect — wait.
“Ocelot effect”?
63. No one can explain the “ocelot effect.”
Ocelots are the only medium-sized tropical cat in the Americas — larger than the host of small cats at one end of the size spectrum and smaller than the puma and jaguar at the other end.
And when an ocelot comes into an area, all the smaller cats clear out for some reason.
Wildlife biologists aren’t sure why this “ocelot effect” happens.
Ocelots are bigger and probably do threaten oncillas, margays, and jaguarundis, but cams and field work have not documented many fights or aggressive displays.
It takes two to fight, and the smaller cats are never around.
Since pacifism is unlikely, could there be some other kind of competition going on?
Probably, although it might not be over food — the most common resource limitation in any habitat.
Because of their size, ocelots take larger prey than oncillas, margays, and jaguarundis do (interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be a “mountain lion/jaguar” effect on ocelots).
Any food competition would more likely be among the small cats, and yet all of them, like the ocelot, appear to be opportunistic generalists living on whatever they can catch.
Much more needs to be learned about these beautiful but elusive neotropical — “New World tropical” — small cats.
However, there is one tropical cat in the Americas that everyone knows, and we’ll meet it next time!
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Sources include:
Cat Specialist Group. 2023. Borneo bay cat. https://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=118
___. 2023. Jaguarundi. http://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=93
___. 2023. Ocelot. http://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=88
___. 2023. Northern tiger cat. http://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=91
___. 2023. Southern tiger cat. http://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=600
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Etymonline. 2023. Doppelganger. https://www.etymonline.com/word/doppelganger
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Flight To Wonder 