It’s a familiar sight for cat owners: You come into the room only to find your furry friend has climbed up onto the dining table in search of food.
A similar thing has now been caught on camera traps in South America: A wild puma (Puma concolor) has been spotted way higher up in the rainforest canopy than they’re usually thought to climb.
The account is reported in a new preprint paper from a team led by the National Museum of Natural History in France.
Most cat species can climb trees, but the bigger the cat, the more likely it is to prefer a ground-dwelling life.
Lions and tigers are stockily built, which is great for overpowering large prey animals on the ground, but it’s not particularly conducive to climbing.
That’s not to say that they never do, but on the rare occasion that you might see a lion or tiger up a tree, they’ll usually stick to the thick, lower branches that can support their weight.
Leopards are the most prolific tree-climbers of the cat family, often stashing their kills up in the treetops to hide them from scavengers. Some evidence suggests they might sometimes hunt tree-dwelling prey while they’re up there, but it’s rarely documented.
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“Questions thus arise about interactions between ground-dwelling top predators and their [canopy-dwelling] prey,” the researchers write.
“Are the latter really safe from climbing large cats in the forest canopy? How high can top predators climb into the treetops?”
The researchers have now captured direct evidence of a puma taking hunting to new heights. The unsuspecting targets were kinkajous (Potos flavus) – nocturnal, arboreal mammals that are related to raccoons.
The intriguing scene was caught on a camera trap placed high in the crown of a nutmeg tree in the Saut Pararé forest in French Guiana. At a height of 33 meters (108 feet) above the ground, the camera was much higher than most wild cat species are usually seen.
Just before 8:30 pm on 24 September 2023, an adult female kinkajou wandered into view of the camera, with a juvenile by her side. The pair were only visible for around 10 seconds, before leaping above the camera and out of sight.
Around 20 minutes later, at 8:49 pm, a puma appears out of the darkness, stalking along the same branch. It stops to sniff a few spots where the kinkajous had been, and seems to be trying to pick up the trail – the predator spends the next 15 minutes prowling back and forth along the branch, and investigating the area.
Finally, at 9:06 pm, the puma slinks back the way it came, and vanishes into the night.
There’s no way to know what happened next, since the ending of the story unfolded offscreen. But either way, a kinkajou watching this video back would surely feel the way we might if we saw security camera footage of an unknown intruder moving through our home in the middle of the night.
After all, it’s thought that life in the treetops helps animals like this avoid the dangerous predators that hunt below.
If there is some relief to be found for the kinkajou population, it’s that this was the only interaction between a cat and its potential prey captured on camera among almost 40,000 individual ‘events’ seen over a decade of observations.
The goal of the camera trap project wasn’t to see how high pumas and other cats can go – according to the researchers on the new paper, it was “to identify and quantify fruit-eating mammals and birds visiting fruiting nutmeg trees”.
But no self-respecting scientist would turn down a bonus finding – especially an interaction as rare as this.
The research has not yet been peer-reviewed or published, but is currently available as a preprint on the bioRxiv server.
This article was fact-checked by Rachel Garner and edited by Peter Dockrill. While we pride ourselves on our process, we are only human. If you spot a mistake, please let us know.
