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Iberian Lynx (Lynx pardinus)

by JR Kinyak on July 8, 2009

in Carnivores

Iberian lynx (click image to enlarge)

Iberian lynx (click image to enlarge)


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The Iberian lynx is the most endangered cat species in the world. In fact, it’s in imminent danger of being the first cat to become extinct since the saber-toothed tiger. While the cats once lived in both Spain and Portugal, there’s no sign of them in Portugal anymore, and they’re confined to only two small regions in Spain now. Fewer than 150 Iberian lynx live in the wild. Fewer than 150.

The good news is that a captive-breeding program has been fairly successful; it’s preparing to release its first kittens two years ahead of schedule. Scientists have also made an important, if sad, discovery about the Iberian lynx. Most Iberian lynx litters are made up of three kittens. It turns out that it’s not uncommon for the kittens to fight to the death when they’re between 30 and 60 days old. In most litters, one kitten doesn’t survive, having been killed by a littermate. With fewer than 150 wild lynx in existence, losing one third of them while they’re still babies is particularly poignant.

Why is the Iberian lynx in so much trouble? One of the biggest reasons is that it eats almost nothing but rabbits, and depending on only one food source is never the best strategy. In the latter half of the 20th century, the rabbit population on the Iberian peninsula declined drastically not only because of deforestation, real estate development, and hunting, but also because one French doctor, in 1952, decided to control the rabbits in his garden by introducing myxomatosis, a rabbit disease. By 1954, myxomatosis had killed 90 percent of French rabbits and had spread throughout Europe, where it eventually killed off a significant portion of the Iberian lynx’s all-you-can-eat-as-long-as-it’s-rabbits food supply. Deforestation and other forms of habitat destruction affect the lynx directly, as well.

El Programa de Conservación Ex-Situ del Lince Ibérico (it’s in Spanish)
SOS Lynx, a Portugal-based organization working to save the Iberian lynx

Tagged as: cat, endangered, threats

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Darwin Days: Lion (Panthera leo)

by JR Kinyak on February 11, 2009

in Carnivores,Theme Weeks

click image to enlarge
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It’s quite fashionable to equate the theory of evolution with Charles Darwin himself. Science magazines and books sell with covers blaring “Darwin Was Wrong,” “Was Darwin Wrong?,” and “What Darwin Got Wrong.” Meanwhile, intelligent-design and creationism proponents attack “Darwinism,” and the New York Times publishes “Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live” and “Let’s Get Rid of Darwinism.” By creating an -ism, the New York Times pieces suggest, “Darwinists” devalue their own arguments, putting them on the same level as, for instance, creationism.

The fact, as far as I can tell, is that Darwin was right about many, many things, and most of those things that he was wrong about (mainly because things like genetics and continental drift hadn’t yet been discovered, and the man couldn’t do it all!) have nevertheless been built on his foundation. Many of the articles celebrating Darwin’s bicentennial point out how remarkable it is that after 150 years, On the Origin of Species is still relevant. Today we’ll talk about one of the ideas Darwin had before his time and that is still being studied and proven: sexual selection.

Basically, sexual selection refers to the favoring of certain traits solely because they are attractive to mates. As Darwin says in Chapter 4 of Origin, “This depends, not on a struggle for existence, but on a struggle between the males for possession of the females; the result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring.” To attract females, males develop showy traits like bright feathers, big antlers, or electric guitars. The reasons why females are attracted to these things in the first place are not fully known; it could be that a male with big horns, for instance, has good genes in other ways; another theory holds that if a male can thrive despite the “handicap” of a huge tail or something, he must be pretty strong.

The lion’s mane has long been a puzzle. In 1859, in Origin, Darwin wrote, “The males of carnivorous animals are already well armed; though to them and to others, special means of defence may be given through means of sexual selection, as the mane of the lion, and the hooked jaw to the salmon; for the shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear.” The going theory for many years was that manes protected male lions from the claws and teeth of their rivals, but now it doesn’t appear that’s true because fighting lions don’t tend to go for the head and neck in particular.

Studies in the past several years have focused on the variations in mane length and color. Researchers found that the luxuriousness of a lion’s mane depended on its climate: lower, hotter, and more humid climates meant skimpier, lighter-colored manes because it can get hot under all that hair. The researchers were also surprised to learn that manes continue developing after the lion’s sexual prime has come and gone. In the hottest places, older males are the only ones with manes to write home about. It makes me wonder if there could be a reverse sexual selection going on there: if you don’t have a mane in a hot place, does it indicate that you’re younger and therefore more virile? I don’t know.

Scientists also fooled around with trying to lure both male and female lions with fake dummy lions of varying mane lengths. They found that males approached the shorter-maned dummies 9 out of 10 times, and females approached the longer-maned ones 13 out of 14 times. The males that intrigued the females intimidated the other males, in other words.

Here’s a book I read part of once that postulates that all human creative culture—from art to architecture to comedy to writing books, etc.—is the result of sexual selection. In other words, men do cool things because chicks dig it: The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller.

Tagged as: books, cat, darwin, evolution, sexual selection

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Serval (Felis serval)

by JR Kinyak on January 21, 2009

in Carnivores

click image to enlarge

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Hello, mammals! Meet the serval, a smallish African wild cat. But not all of it is smallish; in fact, proportionally, the serval has the longest legs and the biggest ears of all the cats. (You can’t see the legs here, obviously, but check out the full-body photographs on ARKive. Servals look like they’re wearing the wrong heads.) They remind me of hyenas, maned wolves, and other savannah or grassland hunters who need long necks and long legs to see above the plants.

Servals are not in any immediate danger of extinction (IUCN classifies them as a species of least concern) but between habitat loss and being hunted for their hides, some populations and subspecies of the serval have decreased or even vanished.

These golden cats hunt rodents, frogs, lizards, and even insects. They attack with a pounce. They can leap three meters in the air to grab a bird in flight. Serval sounds include growls, spits, shrill cries, and purrs. They’re mostly crepuscular (one of my favorite words: active at dusk and dawn) and solitary. Here’s some nice nighttime safari footage of a leaping serval.

Tagged as: cat, threats

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Chinese Mountain Cat (Felis bieti)

by JR Kinyak on August 11, 2008

in Carnivores

click image to enlarge

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The Chinese mountain cat is also called the Chinese desert cat, but it’s not really known to live in the desert. It prefers to roam around mountain meadows, where it eats rodents like pikas and voles and mole-rats, along with the occasional pheasant for variety’s sake. It seems to use its ears when it hunts, listening for the sound of mole-rats burrowing underground, then digging them up for dinner. The Chinese mountain cat is nocturnal and solitary. A major threat to the cat’s continued success is the widespread prejudice against pikas, who are reputed to compete with livestock for grazing rights. When the pikas are poisoned, the Chinese desert cat suffers, too.

Consecutive days of mammals: 1
Record: 16

Tagged as: cat, threats

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Mountain Lion (Felis concolor)

by JR Kinyak on June 22, 2008

in Carnivores

click image to enlarge

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I want to tell you about these amazing old books I recently acquired. A couple of weeks ago, my mom and I went to our local “indoor flea market.” I happened across this old hardbound green book called Wonders of Animal Life, volume four. It’s one of those great old 1920s or 1930s books with the copperplate photo captions and tinted plates for illustrations and lots and lots of black-and-white photos. I fell so in love with volume four that I had to hunt down the rest of the series, and through AbeBooks.com, I found someone selling volumes 1–3. What luck! They arrived today and they’re just as wonderful as volume 4.

The series comprises essays by various scientists and other kinds of experts. There’s no rhyme or reason to their selection or to their arrangement, as far as I can tell. Topics include “Strange Tails and Their Many Uses,” “Gluttons of the Sea,” “Long Necks and Short Necks,” “The Gamut of Sound in the Insect World,” The Wonderful Wanderings of Animals,” “Nature’s Strange Show of Freaks,” “Is Evolution Still Going On?,” and, most pertinent to today’s Daily Mammal post, “The Mystery of the Puma” by Hamilton Fyfe.

Mr. Fyfe is a gentleman not unlike our beloved Ivan T. Sanderson, the Daily Mammal’s patron saint. A war correspondent and political propagandist, a practicer of what he termed vagabondage, a man about town with an opinion on everything, Mr. Fyfe here expounds on the puma, also known as the catamount, the cougar, the panther, the painter, or the mountain lion. After explaining that the puma’s favorite food is horseflesh, he states that “it will not attack or even in some circumstances defend itself from the human race…due to some unexplained influence which the human race seems to have upon it.” Fyfe continues, “This influence is strong enough to make the puma…run from man, and even sit unresisting and trembling while man deals it a death-blow.” According to Fyfe, “the natives of South America” refer to the puma as el amigo del cristiano, the friend of the Christian, and “it has actually been known to volunteer its services as a protector of man.”

A photograph of a puma accompanying the essay is captioned “ONLY WILD ANIMAL THAT IS FRIENDLY TO MAN” and informs that “when confronted by man it usually seems to behave like a large and friendly cat. A wild puma will purr in the presence of man and even rub itself against his legs. But apart from this it has the pleasing habit of playing for hours by itself in the midst of the desert at hide-and-seek or at chasing butterflies.”

Now, I know that pumas avoid man whenever possible. In my life as a citizen of the western United States, I’ve seen bobcats, coyotes, and bears, but never a mountain lion. Whether this is due to some magical influence man has over the species, I don’t know, but Fyfe is correct that they avoid us. That makes it particularly unlikely that they really volunteer their services as bodyguards or that they like to rub up against people’s legs, purring, and it’s hard to imagine them cowering in acceptance when dealt a death blow. Maybe in South America that’s true, but it’s hard to imagine.

While mountain lion attacks on people have always been quite rare, they have increased rather alarmingly in recent decades. A month ago, a large animal that may or may not have been a mountain lion attacked a five-year-old boy in the Sandia Mountains here in Albuquerque. As we humans move closer and closer to the homes of other animals, as we do things that make it harder for them to feel safe and find food and live their lives, we experience more encounters of all kinds with wild animals. It would be nice if they all rubbed up against our legs and purred and protected us and chased butterflies with us. I bet they think it would be nice if we just left them alone.

Consecutive days of mammals:2
Previous record: 16

Tagged as: books, cat, humans, ivan

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Mammalthon 2: Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus)

by JR Kinyak on May 8, 2008

in Carnivores,Mammalthons

click image to enlarge

Here is a cheetah for my tía Yansci, who can go nearly as fast as one on her four-wheeler. We’ve lost about 90 percent of our cheetahs over the last century. And did you know that lions and hyenas prey on cheetah cubs?

Tagged as: cat, endangered

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Mammalthon 2: Tiger (Panthera tigris)

by JR Kinyak on May 4, 2008

in Carnivores,Mammalthons

click image to enlarge

If you’re still sticking around, thanks for sticking around! I have a lot of mammals left to draw, and I will try to draw them all this week. We raised more than $1,000 for the Wildlife Center, which is very exciting and will help them a lot. Here’s a tiger for my cousin Joe.

Tagged as: cat

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