The tilcayo is the new wild cat on the block

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Flora Lichtman (0:18)

Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Big news in Tiny Cats. An itty bitty three pound spotted cat from Bolivia called the Tilkayo is the first new wild cat species described in more than a hundred years. Tilkayo pics have been catnip on social media. I mean, it's adorable. It's grumpy looking in a characteristic cat way.

But there's so much more to Tilkayo's tale, including the fascinating and kind of hard to believe story behind its discovery. So today we're talking to the biologist who worked for nearly 10 years to describe this flashy feline. Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz leads the Bolivian Felid Research and Conservation Program, which studies wildcats like jaguars, ocelots and margays. Paola, welcome to Science Friday.

Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz (1:13)

Hi Flora. Thank you for having me here in Science Friday. I'm so happy.

Flora Lichtman (1:18)

I am so happy to have you.

I feel like Tilkayo is a celebrity. Would you agree?

Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz (1:24)

I totally agree. Like that cat is everywhere, you know, you open TikTok, you open Facebook or Instagram and the cat is there, which is amazing, isn't it? Like we have a great celebrity. Like we are not focusing on people talking about politics or showing like makeup. Our cat is like showing how beautiful it is.

Flora Lichtman (1:44)

Yes, more cat celebrities, 100 percent agree.

Let's talk about this cat's backstory. How was it first found?

Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz (1:53)

Okay. So there was a guy in the Yungas forest. So it's not in the city or something like that, you know, imagine like a rural place. He was walking and he found a kitten in the road, and it was dirty and it was like raining. So he took it and take it at home because it was like, you know, like a kitten. And then like the cat start like growing a little bit, but not that much.

He told us that he lived with the cat one year, but the cat start like chasing the chickens, you know, like having weird behavior. It was not like a domestic cat. And that's how he realized that it was like a wild cat, and he took it like to the rescue center, to the refuge, which is Senda Verde.

Flora Lichtman (2:38)

He knew something was different. When did you and this cat meet?

Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz (2:42)

Okay, so I met when I went to Senda Verde, you know, like I did like some volunteer there. And it was the first time I saw this cat. It was in his enclosure, you know. And the cat like start going down from his house, like pretty like slow.

And it was so slender and so tiny. I cannot like describe.

I was so amazed because I work with cats, you know, and like I have the jaguars in my mind, and I have ocelots which are big. And then you have like this tiny thing. And I remember I asked the people there like, is this like a kitten or a juvenile? Like they told me, no, it's an adult. And I couldn't believe it because it was like really, really small and slender. And then he went down and he started like, you know, walking really fast because I wanted to take pictures. And I took like nearly 100 pictures of the cat, but all the pictures are really awful, you know, like part of the ear, the tail, something like that. It was amazing.

Flora Lichtman (3:40)

So you first met this cat in 2017 Why did it take so long to describe it as a new species? What was the work involved there?

Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz (3:49)

Okay. So that was what we know about Leopardus tigrinus, which was the species, you know. So for me and for all the scientists here, that was a Leopardus tigrinus, so that was not dubbed.

Flora Lichtman (4:02)

That's the genus that it's a part of?

Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz (4:04)

Yes. It was the other species. All of these tiger cats were called Leopardus tigrinus before our paper.

Flora Lichtman (4:12)

That's the species this cat had been gripped into, Leopardus tigrinus, also known as a tiger cat.

Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz (4:17)

Yes.

So this cat, it was a Leopardus tigrinus for science. For local, they have this name Tilkayo to differentiate this cat from the Joffrey's cat, from the Ocelot, from the Jagarundi, from the other cats in the region.

When I realized it was different, it was because I was writing a booklet, so I checked a book of cats and I saw the description of the cat, and there was a picture of a Brazilian one. I saw the picture and then I saw the cat. And I was like, of course the picture is like, the book is so wrong, like what happened with these people? And also the description was like the smallest pose, you know, it didn't match. And that's how I started doing the genetics. So the first time I did the genetics on these cats, the results were a mess. You know, like I was so young and I was so dumb, so I did the genetic of this. You know, I first tried with saliva. I took saliva from the cat, I went to the lab, I did the genetic analysis.