New tiger cat species from Bolivia
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/meet-the-first-new-cat-species-discovered-in-100-years
Who’s going to be the first to add the Tilcayo cat to their life list?
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11 Comments
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Vladimir Dinets
Any record of L. tigrinus s. l. from Bolivia would be that species according to the paper, so a lot of people should have it already. But the molecular distances appear to be rather small and the proposed biogeography makes little sense, so I’d be careful with accepting this split.
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Kyle Finn
The divergence times between the species seems equal to that of many of the accepted species of African mole-rats across Fukomys, Cryptomys and Heliophobius, and I think some other rodents but I know the mole-rat literature better (no suprise there). Some of the Fukomys species may be lumped back togther soon, but it’s pretty well accepted there’s two species of Heliophobius and 5 species of Cryptomys. I also thought with WGS you can ‘get more data’ with fewer samples compared to cytb and previous methods. The 2 phylogenys shown for Leopardus are very different though. I’m not taxonomist, my only personal experience with genetic analysis is local relatedness and dispersal analysis.
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Vladimir Dinets
Divergence time estimates are always very approximate, but in this case we know that there were no cats at all in South America until <3 mya. Also, cats are much more mobile than mole-rats, so complete speciation takes longer and might never happen at all. If this split eventually gets re-lumped, it wouldn't be the first one in Leopardus – remember the story of L. narinensis?
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Ben S
I don’t particularly care about listing (I very much enjoyed my Oncilla encounters on the Manu Road and at Cabanas San Isidro independently of whether they represented different taxa), but those that do should consider establishing a checklist committee to independently evaluate the validity of proposed splits. The SACC provides a good model: https://www.museum.lsu.edu/~Remsen/SACCBaseline.htm
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Vladimir Dinets
The way range maps look in the paper makes it clear they are based on computer modeling, which is always a flawed technique because it’s based on circular reasoning.
Checklist committees would be cool, but SACC specifically might not be the best example – it’s the most heavily criticized of them all (there are now such committees for birds on all continents), although much of that criticism comes from birders who can’t wait for splits to be accepted so their life lists get longer. There’s a ton of those discussions on birdforum.net.
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Eduardo Ruiz
Probably Alex Meyer if he visits that wildlife sanctuary since he has a list of animals seen in zoos