Mike Daboski
speaker
526 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 6d ago
Mike Daboski’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
The cat in question is orangey-brown with black spots, kind of like a leopard, but it only weighs about 5 pounds and is smaller than a common house cat.
What it lacks in stature, though, it makes up for in historical significance.
This is the first new species of cat discovered in over a hundred years.
This all started back in 2016 in Bolivia, when a biologist and National Geographic explorer named Paola Nogales-Ascaruns got a call from a local wildlife sanctuary in the subtropical part of the Andes Mountains.
A local man had dropped off a weird cat he found by the side of the road, they said.
When Nogales Ascarones went to investigate, she discovered an animal that she assumed was a member of leopardus tigranus, basically a species of very small spotted wildcat.
Over the next few years, however, she realized, huh, this doesn't really match the illustrations we have of this species.
Its spots are way too big.
And as her and a team of researchers tried to place the animal on a family tree, they came to understand this isn't just a new branch of an existing species.
This thing is going to need a branch all its own.
The scientific name they're proposing?
Leopardus tilkeo, in honor of the word that locals have taken to calling the animal.
No one really knows where that word tilkeo comes from, it doesn't have a distinct meaning in Spanish or the local language of Quechua.
And that's not the only thing we don't know about this weird cat they're
natural source of food, their predators, how they reproduce, all still very much a mystery.
In large part, that's because of their size.
Small animals are harder to pick up on trail cameras and therefore harder to study.
What's more, researchers don't know how big this population is, and that could have a big impact on conservation efforts.
But as scientists begin the work of figuring out the answers to all those questions, one thing is for certain.
If small wildcats like leopardus tilkeo are to survive, we're going to need to get our heads in the game.
Showing 101–120 of 526 · page 6 of 27
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