Category Archives: Cats

Cats Control Rats … With Parasites

What, then, could attract rats to cat pee? None other than toxoplasma gondii, a parasite carried by cats. If a rat is infected by t. gondii, cat urine doesn’t seem so bad anymore; it’s even kind of attractive. Even more impressively, Stanford University researchers have found that the rats otherwise behave normally, with all their usual fears intact. The response is so specific that cats and t. gondii seem almost like a single organism — which, in a sense, they are.

Bornean Clouded Leopard

Borneo’s clouded leopard identified as new cat species:

Scientists have discovered that the clouded leopard found on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra is an entirely new species of cat. The secretive rainforest animal was originally thought to be the same species as the one found in mainland South-east Asia. The news comes just a few weeks after a WWF report showed that scientists had identified at least 52 new species of animals and plants over the past year on Borneo.

Photo: WWF-Canon / Alain Compost

Big Big Lions

Lions Hunting in the Water

Relentless Enemies program to air on National Geographic in January.

The superlions marooned on an island by Zoe Brennan discusses the program:

“We discovered this tiny sandy island in the Okavango,” says Dereck. “It is extraordinary because it became totally isolated from the mainland 15 years ago when the course of the river changed, and a huge herd of buffalo and lions were trapped on a piece of land measuring 200 square kilometres.”

Through this twist of geographical fate, these two ancient species are now engaged in a desperate battle of survival — watched by six bemused refugee wildebeest and a handful of similarly outnumbered warthogs.

Thus, the island has become a unique, ecological experiment. In order to exist without the customary spectrum of weaker African prey like zebra, giraffe and impala, the Duba lions have had to develop distinct strategies in order to trap the single available food source.

Far Eastern Leopard – Rarest Big Cat

World’s Rarest Big Cat Captured:

The team, led by biologists from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, caught the 100-pound (45-kilogram) male in a snare last week while studying Siberian tigers in the Russian Far East, 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the Chinese border.

The chance capture gave biologists a priceless opportunity to study the elusive feline, and Melody Roelke (below), a specialist in big-cat genetics with the U.S. National Institutes of Health, wasn’t shy about getting a closer look.
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Among the scientists’ main concerns is whether Far Eastern leopards, also known as Amur leopards, can continue to sustain their tiny, isolated population, or whether disease and inbreeding may eventually wipe out the cats.

Jaguars Back in the Southwest USA

photo of jaguar at night in Arizona

Gone for Decades, Jaguars Steal Back to the Southwest

Jaguars are the largest native American cat. They once roamed much of the Southwest, but when ranchers took cattle to the region in the last century, the jaguars were trapped and hunted to extinction in the United States. The last known resident female was killed in 1963 near the Grand Canyon.

Jaguars were thought to be gone from the Southwest until Warner Glenn, a cattle rancher and mountain lion hunter, saw a live one in the Peloncillos Mountains, near the New Mexico border with Mexico, on March 7, 1996.

Story and cool photo by the NY Times. Related: Big Cats in America – The Cat and a Black Bear – Cat Family Tree

Hypoallergenic Cats

Kittens

Some people are kept from owning wonderful cats due to allergies. Now, ‘Hypoallergenic cats’ go on sale. Some cats naturally do not have the normal allergen. By testing large numbers of cats and then breeding those that are free from the allergen cats that do not lead to allergic reactions are now available. Still not cheap, though.

Blog posts from September 2005

Automatic Cat Feeder

The Automatic Cat Feeder:

As I dug around this box, I found an old CD Rom drive and power supply. The thought struck me that I could use the ejecting tray of the CD Rom as a solenoid to push the trigger mechanism of some sort of physical contraption. But then I had a bootstrapping problem – what can I use to push the eject button of the CD Rom on schedule?

After some more thought, I realized that I could just use my spare (working) computer as the basis of the cat feeder. It’s also my home’s Subversion source control server – a rare mix of server workloads indeed! It has a CD Rom drive, so I could just use software to open and close it.

And water for the cat too:

Water flows out of the jug as long as the water level is below the hole at the bottom. When water flows out, the air pressure in jug decreases until it sucks in some air to equalize. When the water level covers the hole, though, the air pressure can no longer equalize, so the water flow stops.

When the cats drink the water level down a bit, the jug can once again equalize its air pressure, and lets more water out.

Don’t miss the video – Related: Engineering at Home

Cat History

New cat family tree revealed

The family history of the cat has been notoriously murky in the past, in part because the few discovered cat fossils are very difficult to tell apart.

The international team took a different approach by sampling DNA from living cats. They looked at both mitochondrial DNA – the scrap of DNA within the parts of the cell that generate energy and are passed along the maternal line – and DNA from the X and Y sex chromosomes.

A picture has emerged of a feline ancestor that wandered all over the world, becoming one of the most successful carnivore families.

Continue reading →

Wild Tiger Survival at Risk

Tiger

WWF study: Tiger habitat down from just a decade ago

The most comprehensive scientific study of tiger habitats ever done finds that the big cats reside in 40 per cent less habitat than they were thought to a decade ago. The tigers now occupy just 7 per cent of their historic range.

Save the Tiger Fund

Tiger habitat shrinking, survival at risk

Tigers struggle with tiny lands

BBC cat conservation page

DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution

DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution, Nicholas Wade, New York Times:

Before DNA, taxonomists had considerable difficulty in classifying the cat family. The fossil record was sparse and many of the skulls lacked distinctiveness. One scheme divided the family into Big Cats and Little Cats. Then, in 1997, Dr. Johnson and Dr. O’Brien said they thought most living cats fell into one of eight lineages, based on the genetic element known as mitochondrial DNA.

Having made further DNA analyses, the researchers have drawn a full family tree that assigns every cat species to one of the lineages. They have also integrated their tree, which is based solely on changes in DNA, with the fossil record. The fossils, which are securely dated, allow dates to be assigned to each fork in the genetic family tree.
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The leopard lineage appeared around 6.5 million years ago in Asia. The youngest of the eight lineages, which led eventually to the domestic cat, emerged some 6.2 million years ago in Asia and Africa, either from ancestors that had never left Asia or more probably from North American cats that had trekked back across the Bering land bridge.

Photos from Curious Cat Travel Photos – Kenya