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The Ghost Dogs of the Amazon

Scientists have produced data that shows the range of an enigmatic short-eared canid species that has yet to be widely studied. It is one of the Amazon rain forest’s most elusive and enigmatic mammals. Experts call the species “shy” or even “a ghost.”

It’s a dog or at least a type of dog. The short-eared dog is the only member of the canine genus Atelocynus, and the only such species unique to the Amazon rainforest. In a study published last month in Royal Society Open Science, 50 researchers chipped away at the creature’s mysteries by putting together a large location data set gleaned mostly from camera trap cameos. By mapping the species’s range and determining its preferred habitat, the scientists, many of whom have never encountered the animal in person, hope to help protect it.

Daniel Rocha, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, and the study’s lead author, became interested in the short-eared dog in 2015, when he began working in the southern part of the Amazon. He and his colleagues set up camera traps to study the local mammal community. As they looked through the footage, “these dogs would appear,” he said. With pricked ears and furrowed brows, they almost look surprised to be caught on camera. It surprised him, too. Even locals who spend a lot of time in the Amazon don’t often see short-eared dogs, which were assumed to be quite rare. They also evade career researchers focused on this region: Mr. Rocha, who spent years leading this study, said, “I’ve never seen the dog in the jungle, ever.”

Carlos Peres, an ecology professor at the University of East Anglia who contributed to the study, has been working in the Amazon for nearly 40 years. His longest sighting of a short-eared dog lasted about 20 seconds as it chased a spiny rat into a hollow log. They’re incredibly secretive,” he said.

Many canid species, from wolves to African wild dogs, hunt in packs and prefer more open habitats, like tundra or grasslands. Short-eared dogs, which only live in the Amazon, are mostly solitary and “almost certainly the most rainforest-adapted of all the canids,” said Dr. Peres. They are most comfortable trotting around in the trees, far from anywhere people might tread.

As a result, the species is “one of the least studied dogs worldwide,” Mr. Rocha said. We don’t know much about their life histories or reproductive strategies, or how many of them exist. We don’t even really know what they eat, although scat studies suggest that they like fish, small mammals and fruit.

Individual experts have gone to great lengths to change that. Renata Leite Pitman, a contributor to the study and an affiliated scholar at Duke University’s Nicholas School of Environment, once obtained a short-eared dog pup that had been raised with domestic dogs. She and her assistant, Emeterio Nuñonca Sencia, trained the dog to walk on a leash and took careful notes on what he sniffed at, ate and avoided. She has also managed to track several dogs with radio collars.

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A ginger crow spotted in Canada

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An arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) collects fish washed up on the shore Kamchatka Peninsula, Russian Far East

Photograph by Dmitry Utkin

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White Jackdaw

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Some time ago I tried to paint few animals from Afghanistan

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Amazing sighting of 2 leopard cubs on the Western shores, Isimangaliso this afternoon- amazingly one appears to be a rare 'Strawberry' leopard. This unusual colouration is thought to be a result a genetic mutation called erythrism that causes an absence of a normal dark pigment or excessive production of red pigment. This has only been recorded a handful of times in leopards so could be a pretty special find for Isimangaliso.

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Colombia confirmed the first case of an albino ocelot, after carrying out genetic tests on a feline with white fur and red eyes. 

The ocelot was found as a kitten, weighing just 440 grams, in the rural zone of Amalfi and was first thought to be a puma jaguarundi.

Medellin's Conservation Park undertook genetic testing on the animal, concluding it was actually a leopardus pardalis, a native species of ocelot that is found all across the Americas.