Nov. 4, 2013 — The world's least known cat has been caught on camera in a previously unsurveyed rainforest by scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Imperial College London.
Until now, the bay cat (Pardofelis badia) had been recorded on camera traps just a handful of times in its Borneo forest home and was only photographed in the wild for the first time in 2003. But more images of this animal have been captured than ever before, together with evidence of four other wild cat species, in a heavily logged area of forest where they were not expected to thrive.
This is only one of four forest areas in all of Borneo -- the third largest island in the world -- which has so far been reported to have all five species, including the Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi), leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis), flat-headed cat (Prionailurus planiceps) and marbled cat (Pardofelis marmorata).
ZSL and Imperial College London PhD researcher Oliver Wearn says: "We discovered that randomly placed cameras have a big influence on the species recorded. This is something I was taught in school -- I remember doing a project on which plant species were most abundant on our playing field, and being taught to fling quadrats over my shoulder in a random direction before seeing what plants lay within it, rather than placing it somewhere that looked like a good place to put it -- the same principle applies here."
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