Ocelot and Opossum Walking Together in Amazon – Trail cam footage by Cocha Cashu Biological Station in Peru
What happened when a wildcat and a small mammal met in the park? Dinner!
This joke isn’t only terrible, it’s actually wrong. Scientists camera trapping in the Amazon revealed an extraordinary behavioral trend between a wildcat species called the ocelot and an opossum.
Multiple video clips showed the two animals walking about “like old friends” the scientists mused.
The video was captured by a team of scientists from Germany and Peru working at the Cocha Cashu Biological Station in Peru’s Manu National Park. They had intended to study the behavior of birds, but in reviewing their footage they witnessed the predatory feline walking at a relaxed pace behind a common opossum, and knew they had to change focus.
After walking out of shot along a trail, they both returned 2 minutes later in the same order but heading in the opposite direction.
The scientists had to know more. They began soliciting their fellow researchers and soon it became clear that this wasn’t a one-off event. Published in the journal Ecosphere, the scientists report 4 separate recorded instances of this behavior.
Ocelots are well-known to prey on opossums, but each of the four events took place in a different region of the Peruvian Amazon, guaranteeing that it isn’t the same two animals. Additionally, the instances span 2019 to 2023.
In the third known instance, recorded in 2022 at the El Gato Concession in the state of Madre de Dios, the ocelot and opossum were captured not only walking together, but also interacting. It seems the ocelot might have pounced on the opossum, but prior to that interaction the opossum displayed no indication of wariness towards its strange acquaintance.
“Even though we still do not know if this is the case, we could be witnessing the South American counterpart to the well-known partnership between coyotes and badgers in North America,” explains Dr. Isabel Damas-Moreira, behavioral ecologist at the Faculty of Biology at Bielefeld University, Germany, and senior author of the study.
Such cooperations are particularly fascinating, “because they can show that these relationships can develop even between unrelated species.”
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Using additional experiments in the wild, they also found that opossums have a clear attraction to the scent of ocelots, on which they often rub themselves against, ignoring other scent samples, such as those of pumas. This suggests a deliberate attraction to ocelots.
What could explain this association?
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Damas-Moreira and her team involved in the discovery have two hypotheses. The first is that the ocelot, which could simply make a meal of the arboreal marsupial, benefits in some way from the latter’s foraging behavior. The second is that the ocelot, which hunts at night, benefits from a potential blending between its natural scent and that of the opossum, fooling potential prey.
“This discovery was accidental. It reminds us how important it is to observe closely – because nature is often more complex than we think” says Damas-Moreira in a statement from her university.
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