It has a remarkable reddish-brown coat, small ears, long tail and yellow green eyes that make this endangered small feline distinctive, but it is rarely seen in the wild. Researchers spending their professional lives in the jungle have never seen it. What we know about Borneo's bay cat Catopuma badiais precious little making conservation of the feline difficult. It is so elusive that science does not even know the best ways to study the cat. We know that it is endemic to the island of Borneo and is related to the Asian golden cat (Catopuma temminckii) Science does not know what ecological niche it fills, or the most basic details of its living such what it eats, whether it is aboreal, nocturnal, solitary or how it mates and raises its young. It has been occassionally captured on trail camera videos, so we know it exists.
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| after Wallace specimen |
Alfred Russel Wallace, famed evolutionary biologist second only to Darwin*, found the bay cat and sent a specimen skull and skin back to the UK in 1856.
[illustration credit: J. Wolf]] Only five more specimens were collected since then, but after 1928 it vanished, as it often does in the wild, from the scientific record. In 1992 indeginous people trapped a female and kept it for several months. They brought the nearly dead, emaciated cat to the Sarawak Natural History Museum. Its pitiful death proved one thing: the species had not gone extinct as some thought.
Panthera NGO is one of the few organizations working on preserving the species. Its director of small cat conservation says that conservationists have recorded it on video only a hundred times. Their elusiveness is aided. by small size, coloration, low population density and extreme speed. Bay cats are faster than the larger clouded leopard, also known for its speed and aboreal agility. Density statistics are only guesstimates based on camera trap data.
Nevertheless scientists think the species is in decline due to habitat loss, Bay cats are not found in peat forests or palm oil plantations, so that rules out a large part of the island. They have been found in secondary forests, which is a bright spot in their struggle to survive next to man and his activities. But you cannot conserve an animal, if you do not know how it lives and what it needs to survive. Radio-collaring may be the only answer despite ethical objections. Larger scale camera trapping may also illuminate the mysterious world of the bay cat, but more funding is required.
Panthera raised a lot of money to study bay cats, but failed to capture a single photo from a hundred cameras.
[photo credit: Borneo Nature Foundation]
*He independently arrived at the theory of evolution through natural selection. Working on the Malay Pennisula, he is credited with the Wallace line that runs throught the Makassar Strait between Boreno and Sulawesiand the Lombok Strait between Bali and Lombok, a division of Indonesia between the eastern part inhabited by species evolved from Asia and the western part inhabited by species evolved from Australia.
