A rare litter of endangered fishing cats at the Cincinnati Zoo is delighting and educating visitors with unusual aquatic feeding behavior.
Three fishing cats (Prionailurus viverrinus) born June 30 at the Cincinnati Zoo have made their debut and are showing off their unique talent for fishing. These web-footed cats are specially adapted for catching prey in the water, and are good swimmers. Unlike most other felines, they prey mainly on fish, instead of small mammals. The litter of three males is the first at the zoo since 1993.
But wild fishing cats are in trouble.
Fishing cats, medium-sized nocturnal cats from the marshes and swamps of South and Southeast Asia, are classified as endangered by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The fishing cat population is decreasing due to habitat loss, overfishing, and human encroachment.
Fishing cats are widely distributed but concentrated primarily in wetland habitats, which are increasingly being settled, degraded and converted. Over 45% of protected wetlands and 94% of globally significant wetlands in Southeast Asia are considered threatened …Threats to wetlands include human settlement, draining for agriculture, pollution, and excessive hunting, wood-cutting and fishing. In addition, clearance of coastal mangroves over the past decade has been rapid. The depletion of fish stocks from over-fishing is prevalent and is likely to be a significant threat.
Humans living nearby are also a direct threat to the cats.
They are often hunted, snared, or poisoned as retribution for real or perceived attacks on domestic fowl or impact on local fisheries. Fishing cats appear to have a high tolerance for human activity and impacts and this increases the overall risk of human-cat conflict.
Fishing cat conservation
The Cincinnati Zoo helped establish the Fishing Cat Research and Conservation project in 2003. The project is surveying cat populations in Thailand to learn more about them in an effort to implement more effective in-situ conservation measures at wetland sites where the species occurs. Researchers have radio-collared seven cats in the past six months – after spending nearly three years trying to locate the first secretive fishing cat.
Fishing cats are about two to three times the size of domestic house cat when fully grown.
To learn more about what you can do to help save fishing cats, visit the Fishing Cat Research and Conservation Project.
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Image source: flickr.com/tambako / CC BY-ND 2.0
About Rhishja Cota-Larson
