Pantanal jaguars eat caimans. They often hunt them from a tree or an elevated position.

Catching a caiman is no easy task: You’re supposed to break its neck… without getting the pointed end of the animal turning back toward you. Then, the not-so-easy part is to bring the victim back up out of the water for an easier meal.

This will allow feeding the younger generation.

And, even – sometimes – sharing a piece of meat with some other friend:

To be finished with a post-prandial drink:

But it is still possible to find wild Iberian lynxes and observe them from hides in some large agricultural estates in the South of Spain. This is the way Wild focus collected those images of the Iberian lynx (a portfolio).

This allows it keeping a perfect aim despite the fast moves of a hunt.

So, two videos I share as a demonstration of lynx leaping capacity.

Now, you better understand how this unter is able to leap onto and surprise a prey from unpredicted distances.

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Via GeekPress.

• Panthera leo leo (the African lion)
• Panthera leo persica (the Asiatic lion)

You have to admit that this was relatively well understood and scientists were discussing the differences between African populations of lions. Where there actual sub-species or independent populations of the same species.

Now, this is challenged very seriously by the most recent scientific studies (as usual in science, it’s still a bit early to settle this into the official theory; but it’s getting more interesting). Recent studies (mostly genetic ones) have shown that the Asiatic lions are more similar to East-Africa lions. And there are more differences than initially expected between African lions.

So, the latest proposal from the Cat Specialist Group (at the Species Survival Commission SSC of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)) is to define two species:

• Panthera leo leo (also called the Northern subspecies)
• Panthera leo melanochaita (the Southern subspecies)

This is a good example of science progress: New data forces to revise the existing understanding to integrate the old facts, the new facts into a better theory. In the case at hand, it is admitted that external physical characteristics and behaviors (and Asiatic lions and North-Eastern African lions are different from these points of view) would be less important to define species. In the past, genetic information was not available and scientists from the past had to rely on available information.

Source: A revised taxonomy of the Felidae, in CATnews Special Issue 11, Winter 2017.

The enormous paws of the Canadian lynx

Scientifically interesting and illustrated with high-quality photos and videos.

They believe that their work identifies three different subspecies of the elusive snow leopard:

1. A Northern subspecies (Panthera uncia irbis), found in the Altai region.
2. A Central subspecies (Panthera uncia uncioides), found in the core Himalaya and Tibetan Plateau.
3. A Western subspecies (Panthera uncia uncia), found in the Tian Shan, Pamir and trans-Himalaya mountain ranges.

They worked DNA analysis from animal scat collected around the places where the cats are living and they sequenced it in order to identify genetic groupings that clearly define subspecies.

This is important because it means that actions to protect the snow leopard have to take this into account in order to preserve the full subspecies range (snow leopards are rare but spread over a huge expanse of territory in a large part of Central Asia).

Source: I initially missed this May’17 information from the Snow Leopard Conservancy.