Unexpected Animal Pair

Scientists in southeastern Peru at Cocha Cashu Biological Station set up a camera trap to study bird behavior, but they found something else instead: an ocelot following an opossum at night in the rainforest.

An opossum, a marsupial, and an ocelot, a wild cat a bit bigger than a domestic cat, are usually prey and predator. But in this case, they were like best friends, just calmly walking together. Isabel Damas-Moreira, behavioral ecologist at Bielefeld University in Germany, said, “We were skeptical about what we have seen.” Maybe the ocelot was following its dinner to observe its behavior. Then, a second clip came: it was the same group walking back a few minutes later.

Interested, they messaged scientists in other areas of the Amazon rainforest. The scientists sent them three, almost matching videos from different years and places.

Then, Dr. Damas-Moreira and her partners set up a test, which they explained in June in the journal Ecosphere. They left pieces of fabric with puma scent, ocelot scent, and a control in front of the camera traps.

Opossums visited the ocelot scent 12 times, usually staying to sniff, bite, or rub the fabric. The puma scent only attracted one short visit. Opossums’ attraction to ocelots is still unidentified, but Dr. Damas-Moreira and her partners think that there’s something that attracts both animals. One theory is “chemical camouflage.”

Ettore Camerlenghi, an evolutionary biologist and ecologist at ETH Zurich and an author of the study, said, “Opossums have a strong smell, and a close-by ocelot might help hide the opossum’s scent from bigger predators, or the opossum’s odor might mask the ocelot’s presence from prey.” This discovery doesn’t amaze Erol Akcay, a theoretical biologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved with the investigation. He said, “We tend to underestimate how much cooperation there is in nature.”

One of Dr. Akcay’s favorite cases of what experts call hunting mutualism is with humans and honeyguide birds. The humans follow the birds to bee nests, and when humans break them for honey, the birds eat the beeswax. As for ocelots and opossums, Dr. Akcay thinks it is similar behavior. He said, “Opossums might guide the ocelot to prey it cannot itself take down, but they feast on the carrion that ocelots leave behind.”

remains a mystery, that it was caught on camera is pure luck.

Good work 🙂