Leopardus pardinoides (Gray, 1867)

de Oliveira, Tadeu G., Fox-Rosales, Lester A., Ramírez-Fernández, José D., Cepeda-Duque, Juan C., Zug, Rebecca, Sanchez-Lalinde, Catalina, Oliveira, Marcelo J. R., Marinho, Paulo H. D., Bonilla-Sánchez, Alejandra, Marques, Mara C., Cassaro, Katia, Moreno, Ricardo, Rumiz, Damián, Peters, Felipe B., Ortega, Josué, Cavalcanti, Gitana, Mooring, Michael S., Blankenship, Steven R., Brenes-Mora, Esteban, Dias, Douglas, Mazim, Fábio D., Eizirik, Eduardo, Diehl, Jaime L., Marques, Rosane V., Ribeiro, Ana Carolina C., Cruz, Reginaldo A., Pasa, Emanuelle, Meira, Lyse P. C., Pereira, Alex, Ferreira, Guilherme B., de Pinho, Fernando F., Sena, Liana M. M., de Morais, Vinícius R., Ribeiro Luiz, Micheli, Moura, Vitor E. C., Favarini, Marina O., Leal, Karla P. G., Wagner, Paulo G. C., dos Santos, Maurício C., Sanderson, James, Araújo, Elienê P. & Rodrigues, Flávio H. G., 2024, Ecological modeling, biogeography, and phenotypic analyses setting the tiger cats’ hyperdimensional niches reveal a new species, Scientific Reports (2395) 14 (1), pp. 1-19 : 8

Leopardus pardinoides (Gray, 1867) 36:

The clouded tiger-cat is a long-tailed 2.27 kg cat with short-round ears and a remarkably margay-looking head, which has a nice dense sof fur of a rich reddish/orangish/grayish-yellow background color adorned with irregularly shaped medium-large “cloudy” rosettes that are strongly marked and ofen coalesce. Distinctively, the species has only one pair of mammae/teats ( Fig. 8b ).

The clouded tiger-cat is found in the vanishing cloud forests of the southern Central American and Andean ranges at typically above 1500 m asl, but especially between 2000 and 3000 m asl, where tree cover is very high (90%), with a canopy height of 20 m, in fertile soils, in a sub-tropical/temperate climate with mild temperatures and very abundant rainfall, typically in areas where ocelot numbers are low or absent. The species may have been evolutionarily limited by intraguild interactions.

Figures

Figure 8. Classic examples of the tiger cat species complex: (a) the savanna tiger-cat (Leopardus tigrinus); (b) the new species, the clouded tiger-cat (Leopardus pardinoides); and (c) the Atlantic Forest tiger-cat (Leopardus guttulus). Drawings by Ricardo Ribeiro; photographs: (a) authors, (b) Johannes Pfleiderer, (c) authors.