Scientists Baffled by Video Footage of Ocelots and Opossums Playing Together
Researchers setting up a camera trap to study bird behavior in the Amazon Rainforest of Peru couldn’t believe their eyes when they instead captured mystifying footage of ocelots and opossums — predator and prey — seemingly enjoying each other’s company.
The unexpected animal friendship is the first-known evidence of an ocelot, a medium-sized wild cat, and an opossum, a marsupial, just hanging out together, “like two old friends walking home from a bar,” describes Dr. Isabel Damas-Moreira to The New York Times.
Dr. Damas-Moreira says that initially they were skeptical of the first video clip showing the unlikely pair walking together; presumably, the ocelot was just toying with the opossum. But then, when the camera picked up the same odd couple walking back in the opposite direction, it was clear that the two had a very different relationship to predator and prey.
The team then got in touch with other researchers operating across the Amazon and found three other videos showing opossums and ocelots walking together in different locations.
Dr. Damas-Moreira and her team decided to find out more by leaving strips of fabric with the scents of ocelots and pumas on them. The opossums returned to the ocelot strips 12 times and would linger to sniff, bite, and rub on the scent. They stayed away from the puma scent.
Their work has been published in the Ecosphere journal
Although scientists don’t understand the opossum’s attraction to ocelots, which will eat them on occasion, they believe it may have something to do with other, bigger predators that they fear more. And that goes the same for ocelots, which can use the scent of an opossum to hide from their predators.
“We tend to underestimate how much cooperation there is in nature,” Erol Akcay, a theoretical biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, tells The Times. “Opossums might guide the ocelot to prey it cannot itself take down, but they can feed on the carrion that ocelots leave behind.”
While this type of behavior among animals of the Amazon Rainforest needs more study, Dr. Damasa-Moreira praised the use of video traps for being able to make groundbreaking observations, noting that a photo camera trap may have captured the same encounter, which may have been misinterpreted as a predator-prey encounter.
Last year, researchers “shouted with joy” when a rarely-seen ocelot was captured on a trail camera in a Sky Island mountain range in Arizona.
Image credits: Ettore Camerlenghi, Dumas Gálvez, Christopher Ketola, Angelo Piga, Nadine Holmes, José Luis Mena, Mathias W. Tobler, Fortunato Rayan, Isabel Damas-Moreira.
