• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Fishing Cat That Quacks Like A Duck Surprises Scientists By Hunting In Trees

July 1, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Something rare and highly unusual was caught on camera in Bangladesh by scientists studying bird colonies. The fishing cat that quacks like a duck is famous for its aquatic hunting skills, and yet their cameras revealed – for the first time – that they also hunt in the treetops.

Advertisement

What are fishing cats?

Fishing cats, Prionailurus viverrinus, is a medium-sized wild cat that lives in South and Southeast Asia. It’s not thought that they have any natural predators, but they are classed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List Of Threatened Species due to human interference, including housing development, hunting, logging, and fishing. A 2020 paper highlighted how only 6 to 11 percent of the areas where fishing cats alongside two other wild cats in the Prionailurus genus are protected.

Advertisement

“This study is important because it shows that many small, rare and elusive cats in the Indian subcontinent don’t get as much attention as the more spectacular big cats,” said study co-author Mats Björklund, Professor Emeritus of Zooecology at Uppsala University, in a statement. “Nevertheless, the need to protect them is just as pressing, so the number and size of the protected areas must be increased to include more biotopes containing these species.”

What do you mean they quack like a duck?

The vocalizations of fishing cats are very peculiar, sounding a bit like a duck quacking. Don’t believe us? Get a load of this:

Fishing cats in the trees

Cameras mounted in the tree canopy in northeast Bangladesh turned up quite a surprise for scientists studying bird colonies when they captured chicks being stolen from their nests by fishing cats. Fishing cats have several adaptations for aquatic hunting, such as large premolars for gripping slippery prey, and semi-webbed paws, and yet they were spotted as high up as 8 meters (26 feet) snapping up multiple bird species’ chicks.

Advertisement

The discovery answered a mystery as to how fishing cats can survive when their habitats flood with the seasons, as it seems they can subsidize their diet of mostly river fish for the odd bird. However, hunting in the treetops can’t protect fishing cats from their biggest threat.

Arboreal predatory behaviour of the fishing cat (circled in red) captured on camera traps in northeast Bangladesh

Arboreal predatory behavior of the fishing cat (circled in red) captured on camera traps in northeast Bangladesh.

Image credit: Allama Shibli Sadik & Muntasir Akash / De Gruyter

“Monitoring of media reports on human–fishing cat conflicts suggests that a fresh conflict is happening in the country every two weeks,” said Assistant Professor Muntasir Akash of the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in a statement. “Conservation efforts targeting fishing cats should thus be prioritized and all options for effective mitigation scientifically assessed.”

“A stable population of wetland bird colonies might be a win-win for the wetland, fishing cats and the local people who depend on the wetlands.”

The study is published in the journal Mammalia.

Advertisement

[H/T: Forbes]

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Microsoft Office 2021 will be available on October 5th
  2. JWST Captures Neptune And Its Intriguing Rings As We Have Never Seen Before
  3. People Are Hooked Watching The Bottle-Smashing Trend On TikTok – What Can It Tell Us About Our Brain?
  4. The World’s Longest River? That Depends Who You Ask

Source Link: Fishing Cat That Quacks Like A Duck Surprises Scientists By Hunting In Trees

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Colossal’s “Dire Wolves” Are Now 6 Months Old – And They’ve Doubled In Size
  • How To Fake A Fossil: Find Out More In Issue 36 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • Is It True Earth Used To Take 420 Days To Orbit The Sun?
  • One Of The Ocean’s “Most Valuable Habitats” Grows The Only Flowers Known To Bloom In Seawater
  • World’s Largest Digital Camera Snaps 2,104 New Asteroids In 10 Hours, Mice With 2 Dads Father Their Own Offspring, And Much More This Week
  • Simplest Explanation For “Anomalous” Signals Coming From Underneath Antarctica Ruled Out
  • “Lizard Shampoo” And Pagan Texts Suggest “Dark Age” Medicine Wasn’t So Dark After All
  • Japanese Macaques May Mourn Their Dead – As Long As They’re Not Maggot-Infested
  • This Is What You’d Hear If You Listened To Voyager’s Golden Record NASA Sent To Interstellar Space
  • RFK Jr’s New Vaccine Advisors Just Recommended Fall Flu Vaccines – But There’s A Catch
  • Controversial World-First Project To Create Human DNA From Scratch Takes First Steps
  • Humans Weren’t The First Species To Travel Around The Moon. They Lost This Race To An Unexpected Animal
  • When You Hack A Shark, You’re Exploiting A Glitch Billions Of Years In The Making
  • Wellness Whales, A New Blood Type, And A DJ Set From Space
  • Hate Flying Ants? We Used To Have Ones The Size Of Hummingbirds
  • ‘Tis The Season To See Titan Cast A Shadow On Saturn – Especially If You Are In America
  • World’s Bravest Vets Put Full Metal Dental Crown On A Bear For The First Time
  • “Spider Rain”: The Bizarre Phenomenon That’ll Send Arachnophobes Into A Spin
  • Scientists Gave Mice A Human “Language Gene” And Something Curious Unfolded
  • Surveillance Of People Is More “Pervasive And Normalised” Than Previously Thought, Endangering Our Privacy
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version