Petition: Science Just Named Its First New Cat Species in 100 Years. Its Conservation Status Is Blank.

A Bolivian family found what they took to be a stray kitten and handed it to a sanctuary. Staff at Senda Verde, in the Yungas cloud forest on the eastern slope of the Andes, assumed it was an oncilla, a small spotted cat already known from Brazil. He is now about ten years old, weighs three pounds, measures eighteen inches nose to tail base, and as of last month he is the only known individual of a species that science had never described.

Researchers led by National Geographic Explorer Paola Nogales Ascarrunz compared complete genomes from 38 cats across the Leopardus genus and found he did not fit any of them. The paper, published in Current Biology on 17 September, names him Leopardus tilcayo, keeping the word Bolivian communities have used for the animal for generations. It is the first living cat species to be formally named and described in more than a hundred years.

Here is the part that should worry you. The tilcayo has no conservation status. Not endangered, not vulnerable, not least concern. The IUCN Red List entry reads unknown, because a species cannot be assessed until it exists on paper, and until last month this one did not.

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There is a second thing happening here that is easy to read as good news and is not. The same genetic work that produced the tilcayo is pulling the whole tiger cat group apart. Brazilian biologist Tadeu Gomes de Oliveira, who will lead the Red List assessments, expects the number of recognised tiger cat species to rise from three to six or seven.

Splitting a species does not create more animals. It takes a population that was counted as one widespread species and reveals it to be several narrow ones, each with a fraction of the range and a fraction of the numbers everyone assumed. A cat thought to be secure across South America turns out to be six cats, each holding on in a smaller patch of forest. Every one of those populations is rarer than anybody realised yesterday, and none of them has had its status reassessed yet.

The tilcayo lives in the Yungas, a band of cloud forest on the Andean slope that is under pressure from agricultural clearance, road building and fire. Its entire known range is small. We do not know how many there are. We do not know whether the population is stable or falling. One animal sits in a sanctuary and the rest of the species is a question mark.

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What this petition asks for is unglamorous and it is the thing that actually matters: survey funding, a Red List assessment, and habitat protection in the Yungas that does not wait for the paperwork to catch up. Protection follows classification, classification follows data, and data follows money. Researchers are also pushing for a global monitoring programme for small wild cats, which have historically received a tiny share of the attention and funding that goes to big ones. Our coverage of the cats most people share a house with is a long way from a cloud forest, and the gap in what we know is the point: we can describe the indoor life of a domestic cat in detail and cannot say how many of its wild cousins are left.

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