Leopardus tigrinus (Schreber, 1775)

de Oliveira, Tadeu G., Fox-Rosales, Lester A., Ramírez-Fernández, José D., Cepeda-Duque, Juan C., Zug, Rebecca, Sanchez-Lalinde, Catalina, Oliveira, Marcelo J. R., Marinho, Paulo H. D., Bonilla-Sánchez, Alejandra, Marques, Mara C., Cassaro, Katia, Moreno, Ricardo, Rumiz, Damián, Peters, Felipe B., Ortega, Josué, Cavalcanti, Gitana, Mooring, Michael S., Blankenship, Steven R., Brenes-Mora, Esteban, Dias, Douglas, Mazim, Fábio D., Eizirik, Eduardo, Diehl, Jaime L., Marques, Rosane V., Ribeiro, Ana Carolina C., Cruz, Reginaldo A., Pasa, Emanuelle, Meira, Lyse P. C., Pereira, Alex, Ferreira, Guilherme B., de Pinho, Fernando F., Sena, Liana M. M., de Morais, Vinícius R., Ribeiro Luiz, Micheli, Moura, Vitor E. C., Favarini, Marina O., Leal, Karla P. G., Wagner, Paulo G. C., dos Santos, Maurício C., Sanderson, James, Araújo, Elienê P. & Rodrigues, Flávio H. G., 2024, Ecological modeling, biogeography, and phenotypic analyses setting the tiger cats’ hyperdimensional niches reveal a new species, Scientific Reports (2395) 14 (1), pp. 1-19 : 8

Leopardus tigrinus (Schreber, 1775) 34:

The savanna tiger-cat is a 2.34 kg felid with a slender long-legged body and long margay-sized thin tail, with proportionally large ears, and a yellowish or gray-yellowish background color with either small open or solid large dot-like rosettes that may coalesce, with two pairs of mammae/teats ( Fig. 8a ).

The savanna tiger-cat range comprises varying vanishing savanna and dry scrub woodland formations in Brazil and the Guiana Shield, which means that they mostly live in lowland non-forested habitats with low tree cover (typically <50%), with a median canopy height of 3 m that nevertheless has dense undergrowth, and that are mostly found in less productive soils, in areas of dry weather (<1000 mm rainfall/year) with hot temperatures, and in tropical dry/semi-arid climates, typically where the dominant mesopredator/intraguild killer (ocelot) is absent or low in number. Intraguild interactions appear to play a role and to have evolutionarily limited the species multidimensional space.

Figures

Figure 8. Classic examples of the tiger cat species complex: (a) the savanna tiger-cat (Leopardus tigrinus); (b) the new species, the clouded tiger-cat (Leopardus pardinoides); and (c) the Atlantic Forest tiger-cat (Leopardus guttulus). Drawings by Ricardo Ribeiro; photographs: (a) authors, (b) Johannes Pfleiderer, (c) authors.