The adorable clouded tiger-cat is brand-new to science—and already under threat

Most people are all too familiar with the lions, tigers, and other big cats of the world. But tiger-cats, which are about the size of a house cat and roam from Costa Rica to Argentina?

Truth be told, even experts get them confused. 

Until now, only two tiger-cat species have been formally recognized—the northern tiger cat, or oncilla (Leopardus tigrinus) and the southern tiger cat, or southern tigrina (L. gutullus), which also has three subspecies. 

But about 14 years ago, Tadeu de Oliveira received an email that made him rethink everything he knew about these small predators.

“I can even pinpoint the date,” says de Oliveira, a wildlife conservationist at the State University of Maranhão in Brazil. “It was June 22, 2010.”

The message came from researcher Rebecca Zug, who was working on spectacled bears in Ecuador and had caught some camera trap photos of a curious-looking kitty with a long tail and loads of spots—a tiger-cat unlike any other de Oliveira had ever seen. (Read about the güiña, a six-pound "mystery cat.")

“I was mesmerized by what I saw,” he recalls.

Fast forward to 2024, and de Oliveira has teamed up with more than 40 small cat researchers to formally propose a new species known as the clouded tiger-cat (L. pardinoides), which would bring the total number of tiger-cat species to three.

The team examined 1,400 records from museums and camera traps, allowing them to compare sizes, shapes, and color patterns among tiger-cats, as as well as determine the habitats where each species lives. They also analyzed the clouded tiger-cat’s genetics to make a make an airtight case for its species status.

Despite the happy news of a new species, published recently in Scientific Reports, the scientists likewise uncovered a grim reality—each tiger-cat exists in far fewer places than once believed.

“They’ve lost more than 50 percent of their original area,” explains de Oliveira. “The red alert has been turned on.”

Herding cats

With the addition of the clouded tiger-cat, there are now nine species in the Leopardus genus.

“It’s kind of confusing for the general public, because [the genus] is not really related to the leopard,” says study co-author Eduardo Eizirik, a conservation geneticist at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.

Rather, the Leopardus genus includes Western Hemisphere species, such as the ocelot, margay, Andean cat, and pampas cat, in addition to the tiger-cats. (Related: “Out of the shadows, the wildcats you've never seen.”) 

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And though many of the felines look alike, scientists continue to find ways in which each species has carved out its own evolutionary path.

For instance, their genetic work revealed clouded tiger-cats split from the other two tiger-cat species more than two million years ago. And by handling living clouded-tiger cats, the team unveiled a “quite unexpected”—and unexplained—physical difference: clouded tiger-cats have just one set of nipples, while the other species have two, says de Oliveira. 

They also discovered each tiger-cat, which average about five pounds, has its own habitat. Clouded-tiger cats live exclusively in the Central American and Andean mountain chains, whereas L. tigrinus sticks to the savannas of the Guiana Shield and central and northeastern Brazil. L. guttulus dwells in the lowland forests of Brazil's Atlantic coast. This is also why the authors propose re-establishing the common names for those species as the savannah tiger-cat and Atlantic Forest tiger-cat, respectively. (Read more about little-known small wildcats.)

“So regardless of how [similar] they are, visually, these things have evolved separately,” says Eizirik.

“They have accumulated their own adaptations, their own ecologies, their own roles in ecosystems,” he says. “And it's important to conserve them because they play such an important role,” for instance as hunters of small forest prey, “and because they represent unique lineages in the world.”

Threats to tiger-cats

While it will take some time yet for the new species to become official, the study has received high marks.

"They used state-of-the-art methodology,” says Mel Sunquist, co-author of The Wild Cat Book: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Cats and professor emeritus at the University of Florida, in an email.

“And the most striking thing about the research is, if you look at the list of authors, they are all experts from the cats’ range countries,” says Sunquist, who was not involved in the research. “This is a unique cooperative effort.”

De Oliveira says the inclusion was both intentional and necessary for the future of these fascinating felines.

Tiger-cats everywhere are under imminent threat of losing their habitats to agriculture and development, he says. And pathogens, such as canine distemper virus, have the ability to spill over from domestic animals. Also unfortunate is the fact that most tiger-cat populations exist outside of protected areas, similar to the situation with cheetahs in Africa, he says. (Learn how distemper is infecting Siberian tigers.)

As it stands, the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists both L. tigrinus and L. guttulus as vulnerable to extinction. But now that their ranges have been found to be less than half of what they were before, de Oliveira says that a more dire status will almost definitely be on the way for both—and the clouded tiger-cat will likely join them.

“Every time I start talking about it, I get emotional,” says de Oliveira, who has founded the Tiger Cats Conservation Initiative, which helps local people vaccinate their domestic animals against distemper and other diseases, and also rehabilitates and releases tiger-cats confiscated from the pet trade, among numerous other initiatives.

“People have to realize that publishing papers is one thing. Taking conservation action is another,” he says. “And you cannot do one without the other. Otherwise, you’re not doing your job.”