Last time, we saw how the seemingly crazy description of a captive animal by Pliny the Elder, in Ancient Rome, turned out to be accurate — jungle cats do have physical resemblances to both wolves and small spotted cats.
However, if a Time Lord or other character had transported Pliny to Latin America, jaguarundis might have stumped the old Roman naturalist.
“That’s no cat! It’s a space station weasel!”
They are cats, but even wildlife biologists have trouble telling them apart from a weasel-like carnivore known locally as a tayra:
Same general appearance, but this animal doesn’t move like a cat.
The jaguarundi does. You can see that in the first cameo of this fascinating trail cam video:
While twice as large as Fluffy, jaguarundis are nowhere near as large as a mountain lion, yet they sometimes stalk through the forest as if they owned it. ❤
Perhaps this is because of their family connections —
76. Jaguarundis have surprising relatives.
A little background, first —
According to the references at the end of this post, Family Felidae is older than H. sapiens by almost thirty million years.
The current cat groups were already in place when we arrived. Even the youngest line of living cats (Felis) is more than four million years old.
Although we weren’t around for any of that, scientists have worked out many clever ways of finding out how cats evolved down through time. Their tools include everything from systematic research on fossils to phylogenetic molecular studies on the DNA of living cats.
What does all this have to do with the jaguarundi?
It’s because, if you didn’t know the research was credible, you might not believe the surprising result: jaguarundis, mountain lions, and cheetahs have a common ancestor!
Family photo or mug shots? (All three by Tambako the Jaguar on Flickr, CC BY-SA-ND 2.0)
This raises SO many questions, particularly about the cheetah connection — too many to get into here.
Also, some of the questions raised by ongoing work have blossomed into controversies.
For instance, there’s a regular firestorm going on about whether the fossil cat that most of us think of as an “American cheetah” — a/k/a Miracinonyx — was really a cheetah or something else.
Since very few mountain lions or cheetahs, and almost no jaguarundis, have been identified anywhere in the fossil record, the discussion hasn’t been settled yet.
Werdelin et al. suggest, after studying both genetics and fossils, that mountain lions and cheetahs evolved in North America six to seven million years ago (before plate tectonics connected North and South America together).
Land bridges during the Ice Age carried them to Eurasia and, in the cheetah’s case, to Africa.
Then Eurasian mountain lions and “American cheetahs” died out, leaving the two surviving species in their present ranges — the New World and the Old, respectively.
Where jaguarundis fit into this picture is a total mystery since the living cats and their fossils are very, very hard to find in the field.
However, now that we know the evolutionary link, it is easy to see signs of its larger relatives in the jaguarundi.
It has the same long body and tail, as well as the small rounded head.
The powerful hind legs that power a jaguarundi up trees, natural or in zoos —
This kitty is doing that sad pacing seen in zoo cages sometimes, but the video also shows the red jaguarundi morph as well as the ease and speed with which the cat moves up and down the trunks.
— also help the mountain lion to perform incredible jumps —
— and the cheetah…well, it’s always fun to watch:
“They help me spurn the ground.” — Cheetah.
However, there is still much to learn about all three members of what many biologists call the puma lineage.
77. Jaguars and jaguarundis are two totally different cats.
We might confuse jaguars with their fellow big cat — the leopard — but no one can ever mistake one of these burly spotted bruisers for a weasle-shaped, solid-colored, little jaguarundi.
Why are the names so close? Because humans who spoke a different language from us named them.
Just as, in Europe centuries ago, all spotted wild cats used to be called “pards” or “lonce” (which morphed into “ounce” and “lynx”), local Tupi and Guarani speakers described several South American animals as yaguara — “wild beast that overcomes its prey at a bound.”
Occasionally the jaguar, which dominated traditional religions, was singled out as yaguarete — “true yaguara.” Over time and through centuries of conquest and colonization, this became “jaguar.”
As for jaguarundis, I was unable to find online videos of a tree-top hunt, but multiple sources report that they pursue small prey through the forest canopy, leaping from limb to limb (though they also spend time down on the ground).
That arboreal pursuit looks like “overcoming prey at a bound.” Therefore, “jaguarundi” might have come down to us from the Old Tupi word for “dark jaguar.”
Be that as it may, today jaguars are part of the genus Panthera (the big cats), while taxonomists file jaguarundis under either Herpailurus or Puma, which is the mountain lion and cheetah group.
That difference comes from uncertainty about exactly where jaguarundis belong in the lineage — a point that doesn’t at all affect our appreciation of this little Latin American cat!
78. Jaguarundis are the most commonly seen wild cat in Latin America but still are not well understood.
So what else is known about jaguarundis, besides their resemblance to weasels (meow — just a reminder) and the two larger cats that sit beside jaguarundis on that cat family tree branch?
Jaguarundis come in three colors, per the Cat Specialist Group:
- Brownish black (especially in rainforests).
- Gray.
- Yellowish-red (particularly in open, drier areas).
They range (in some cases, used to range) from southern Texas through Mexico’s coastal lowlands southward through Central America and into South America, east of the Andes, down to central Argentina and Uruguay.
Caveat: The last known jaguarundi in Texas was killed by traffic and found in 1986. Also, some have been reported but not confirmed on the western slopes of the Peruvian Andes. The Cat Specialist Group notes that jaguarundi records throughout this range need to be updated and expanded.
As you can tell from all the different country covered in that broad range, jaguarundis are extremely adaptable — anything from Amazonian rainforest to semiarid thornscrub suits them.
They’re generally seen in places that offer a mix of dense cover, openings, and edges (yes, farm fields make good jaguarundi hunting grounds, too).
Jaguarundis seem to hunt most often in daytime, perhaps so as to avoid competing with the other small cats in the neighborhood, including ocelots, margays, tigrinas, and others that come out at night or at dawn and dusk.
Okay.
This seems to be quite thorough knowledge about jaguarundis, so why isn’t there other conservation information, like how jaguarundis interact with each other and with other wild cats, or exactly what prey animals they depend on?
Unfortunately, jaguarundis are so elusive that it’s not yet possible even to get an accurate estimate of their numbers.
Twenty years ago, Sunquist and Sunquist noted that jaguarundis are common in many places, but further research has shown that this might be an illusion caused by their tendency to be active during the day — when people are most likely to see them.
Is this the whole jaguarundi population or might there be uncounted hordes in the background — well, if not hordes, then enough breeding individuals to guarantee that jaguarundis will be with us for a long time to come?
Inquiring minds — some of the best on this planet — want to know, and they are hard at work trying to learn the answers.
Some lagniappe:
For anyone who still has doubts about jaguarundis being cats:
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Sources include:
Cat Specialist Group. 2023. Jaguarundi. http://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=93 Last accessed December 7, 2023.
Giordano, A. J. 2016. Ecology and status of the jaguarundi P uma yagouaroundi: a synthesis of existing knowledge. Mammal Review, 46(1): 30-43.
Johnson, W. E.; Eizirik, E.; Pecon-Slattery, J.; Murphy, W. J.; and others. 2006. The Late Miocene Radiation of Modern Felidae: A Genetic Assessment. Science, 311:73-77.
Kitchener, A. C.; Breitenmoser-Würsten, C.; Eizirik, E.; Gentry, A.; and others. 2017. A revised taxonomy of the Felidae: The final report of the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group. https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/32616/A_revised_Felidae_Taxonomy_CatNews.pdf
Macdonald, D. W.; Loveridge, A. J.; and Nowell, K. 2010. Dramatis personae: An introduction to the wild felids, in Biology and Conservation of Wild Felids, eds. Macdonald, D. W., and Loveridge, A. J., 3-58. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Migliorini, R. P.; Peters, F. B.; Favarini, M. O.; and Kasper, C. B. 2018. Trophic ecology of sympatric small cats in the Brazilian Pampa. PloS One, 13(7): e0201257. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201257
Sunquist, M. and Sunquist, F. 2002. Wild Cats of the World. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=IF8nDwAAQBAJ
Werdelin, L.; Yamaguchi, N.; Johnson, W. E.; and O’Brien, S. J.. 2010. Phylogeny and evolution of cats (Felidae), in Biology and Conservation of Wild Felids, eds. Macdonald, D. W., and Loveridge, A. J., 59-82. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wikipedia. 2023. Jaguarundi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguarundi Last accessed December 7, 2023.
Zuercher, G. L.; Owen, R. D.; Torres, J.; and Gipson, P. S. 2022. Mechanisms of coexistence in a diverse Neotropical mammalian carnivore community. Journal of Mammalogy, 103(3): 618-638.
Flight To Wonder 