Small Cats: Leopard Cats and Their Kin

Leopard cat
(a northern subspecies)

The jungles of Southeast Asia are home to a particularly large number of cat species. These include tigers, leopards, and clouded leopards, but also a number of smaller species. Of these, the most common are probably the jungle cat, which is a particularly close relative of the domestic animal, and the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) which is slightly less so.

Leopard cats were first identified as a separate species back in 1792, on the basis of animals known to live in Bengal, and some variant of the name "Bengal cat" remains common in a number of non-English languages. That "leopard cat" is often preferred is doubtless due to the fact that the Bengal region is just one part of their much larger total range.

Indeed, leopard cats are known from Kashmir in the west right across to Vietnam and Malaysia in the east, and also through most of the non-mountainous parts of China, reaching into the Russian Far East north of Manchuria. They are one of only two species of wild cat native to Korea (the other being the Eurasian lynx) and they are also found on a number of islands, including Taiwan.

Freedom to Dive

Mediterranean water shrew

There are well over 5,000 different species of mammal in the world. From a human perspective, a great many of them are very similar - at least a thousand of them can reasonably be described as either 'mice' or 'rats'. Where they live in different continents or unconnected parts of the same continent, that's not really an issue: European beavers don't care what the American sort are up to. It's a different matter when they live together.

But, of course, they often do. For example, there are fifteen different species of insect-eating bat in Britain alone. But if you have two different kinds of animal living in the same place, in the same way, eating the same thing, they have no choice but to compete. Inevitably, one of them will be slightly better at it than the other, and, given enough time, one of them has to either die out or change what it's up to. So how come there are so many similar animals?

Generally speaking, the answer is that they're not all doing exactly the same thing: there's some subtle difference in what they're up to. In some way or another, they're partitioning the available resources. One simple possibility, for instance, is that they aren't eating the same thing after all. If (to pick a rather unlikely hypothetical example) one of you eats only raspberries and the other eats only blackberries, there's plenty for both, and you don't have to fight over who gets to eat what.