- Two uncommon subspecies of leopard cat, the Iriomote cat and Tsushima cat, may be discovered solely on the Japanese islands they’re named after. With populations hovering round 100 people every, the cats are the main focus of Ministry of the Environment-led conservation measures.
- The Iriomote cat has tailored to its remoted ecosystem by creating a extra various weight loss program than different felids. Following its well-publicized discovery within the Nineteen Sixties, the cat has develop into an enduringly in style image of the island’s nature, and locals eagerly help in conservation efforts.
- The Tsushima cat has confronted habitat degradation attributable to deforestation, canal development and, most lately, ravenous deer. As the islands’ human inhabitants declines, native farmers are working to protect the moist rice fields that assist assist the cat inhabitants.
- On each Iriomote and Tsushima, roadkill accidents are a significant menace to the low wildcat populations. Conservation facilities on the islands intention to boost driver consciousness by offering crowdsourced data on cat sightings, posting cautionary indicators at cat crossing hotspots, and educating locals and vacationers.
Japan is home to 2 uncommon subspecies of leopard cat, one discovered solely on Iriomote Island and the opposite on Tsushima Island. Neither bigger than a housecat, every subspecies has an estimated inhabitants of solely round 100 people, and each are listed as critically endangered on the Japanese Red List of Endangered Species.
While the Iriomote cat is extensively thought of an unbiased subspecies — as indicated by its scientific identify, Prionailurus bengalensis iriomotensis — the Tsushima cat has been lumped along with different members of Prionailurus bengalensis euptilura present in continental East Asia.
Restricted to their islands, the 2 cat populations are vulnerable to a spread of threats, with Tsushima cat numbers declining over the second half of the 1900s from a reported 200-300 people within the mid-Nineteen Seventies (though specialists observe that the survey strategies then had been unclear). Both populations particularly undergo from roadkill accidents, and the Tsushima cat has been additional impacted by habitat degradation and fragmentation.
Protecting island species like these poses particular challenges for wildlife conservationists. First, the animals often exist in comparatively small numbers that may simply be snuffed out by a single illness outbreak or different disruption, and they’re additionally remoted — with nowhere to run to when the going will get powerful. The smaller the island habitat, the higher the probability of extinction, recognized scientifically because the species-area relationship, a part of the broader principle of island geography.
But for the Iriomote and Tsushima wildcats, their island properties have additionally performed to their favor, catching the eye and creativeness of islanders, conservationists and the broader Japanese public.
Protecting Japan’s remaining island cats
Wildlife conservation facilities on each islands, run by Japan’s Ministry of the Environment (MOE), have spearheaded multipronged efforts to gather up-to-date knowledge on cat populations, stop roadkill, rehabilitate injured cats, and educate locals and vacationers as to the felines’ plight. Their work is augmented by group volunteers, native governments and nonprofits.
Some initiatives have seen success: On Iriomote, for instance, the native authorities and nonprofits have rid the island of stray cats, recognized to unfold ailments like feline AIDS. Other efforts haven’t been as fruitful: A captive-breeding program for the Tsushima cat, applied in collaboration with zoos across the nation since 1999, has but to see any people launched into the wild.
Despite ongoing challenges, specialists are cautiously hopeful over each wildcats’ future prospects. The Iriomote cat inhabitants is, at current, steady, and the Tsushima cat has made a miraculous reappearance on components of the islands it had beforehand disappeared from. But fixed vigilance and day-to-day take care of the pure setting are obligatory to guard the small, vulnerable populations.
Iriomote cat beloved, serving to put it aside
People residing on Iriomote knew of the yamapikaryā, actually “that which shines in the forest,” lengthy earlier than the small felid was “discovered” by an outsider in 1965 and dubbed the “Iriomote cat.”
Following its well-publicized discovery by Yukio Togawa, a journalist turned ecologist and novelist, the little wildcat was designated a particular pure monument by the Japanese authorities in 1977. It has since develop into an enduringly in style image of Iriomote, a 289-square-kilometer (112-square-mile) subtropical island positioned east of Taiwan, coated right this moment in broadleaf and mangrove forests. Iriomote, together with a number of different islands, was designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2021.
Believed to have diverged from Taiwan’s Formosan wildcat about 90,000 years in the past, the Iriomote cat tailored to life on the small island by creating some of the various diets amongst any felid, feeding on reptiles, amphibians, birds, freshwater invertebrates, and bugs.
The cat’s habitat stays comparatively undisturbed, with 77% (224 km2, or 86 mi2) of the island designated as government-owned, protected forest land. But the enlargement of a highway beginning in 1994 to enhance tour bus access alongside Iriomote’s northern and western coasts led to a rise in roadkill incidents. An all-time yearly excessive of 9 cat-car incidents occurred in 2018. Of the 101 incidents from 1978 to April 2022, 91 had been deadly to one of many uncommon cats.
The Iriomote Wildlife Conservation Center has responded by calling on residents and vacationers to submit their cat sightings through cellphone or on-line kind. The middle has used this knowledge to pinpoint wildcat crossing hotspots and to place warning highway indicators at these places. It additionally makes and shares maps displaying the place drivers needs to be additional cautious.
“We receive about 400 submissions about cat sightings per year,” mentioned Wataru Ishihara, a conservation middle staffer. “Many of the people on Iriomote really care for the nature here, including the cat.”
The middle usually works with volunteers to clear brush alongside roads, so drivers can extra simply discover and keep away from the wildcats. The city of Taketomi, which has jurisdiction over Iriomote, additionally put in 123 cat underpasses alongside the island’s largest highway.
But rising tourism pressures stay a menace to the felid and its habitat. Last yr, roughly 330,000 vacationers visited the island, and that quantity is anticipated to extend following the island’s recent designation as a World Heritage Site. In response to the surge in guests, Taketomi proposed, and the MOE permitted, a plan to limit vacationer numbers to components of Iriomote Island.
But regardless of media reviews that linked these proposed restrictions with the critically endangered cat, Taketomi city officers advised Mongabay that total safety of the island’s pure setting, fairly than the Iriomote cat particularly, motivated the vacationer cap.
“Although some conservationists argue that increased tourism isn’t good for the cat, town hall doesn’t see such a direct cause and effect,” defined Tsuyoshi Katsuki, a member of Taketomi city’s division for nature and tourism. “However, I’m not saying there’s no risk. I think it’s very important for town hall to call on tourists to ensure that cats aren’t hit by cars.”
Hordes of deer, roadkill accidents threaten Tsushima cat
Although the Tsushima cat resembles its Iriomote cousin in dimension, and in being an island dweller, the similarities cease there.
Tsushima, a 709-km2 (274-mi2) archipelago positioned midway between Japan and South Korea, has a declining human inhabitants of roughly 28,000, down from practically 40,000 in 2007. The island’s principal industries are fishing and forestry. And whereas a lot of Iriomote is protected, government-owned land, roughly 80% of Tsushima is roofed by privately owned forest.
Historically, the Tsushima cat inhabited each the north and south islands. However, locals initially noticed the Tsushima cat not as “beloved” however as a chicken-thieving pest, and even hunted it for its fur and meat a bit of over a century in the past.
While the Iriomote cat is an unfussy eater, the Tsushima cat has a extra commonplace felid weight loss program centered on small mammals, though it’ll additionally feed on birds, amphibians and bugs. The Tsushima cat depends on a pure setting that helps an abundance of small prey, equivalent to forests and their underbrush, and moist croplands.
The greatest threats to the Tsushima cat are habitat loss and degradation, adopted by roadkill accidents, getting caught in traps set for different animals, ailments unfold by housecats, and canine assaults, in keeping with the MOE’s Tsushima cat safety coverage. This 2022 doc notes that “large-scale logging in the 1950s and 1960s on [the southern island] is estimated to have had a significant impact on the Tsushima cat’s habitat.”
Additionally, complete farmland on Tsushima, an vital feeding habitat for the cat, has fallen from round 2,500 hectares in 1975 to about 830 now (about 6,200 to 2,050 acres), with many rice fields transformed from moist to dry fields.
In recent years one other menace — four-legged and ravenous — has emerged. “In terms of habitat degradation, right now the biggest problem isn’t plantation forestry or logging, it’s deer,” mentioned Takashi Shibahara, a ranger on the Tsushima Wildlife Conservation Center, in an interview with Mongabay.
“Tsushima currently has an estimated deer population of 40,000 to 45,000,” he defined “When deer eat the forest’s undergrowth, rodents, which are the Tsushima cat’s main food source, disappear.”
Also, the cat’s authentic habitat has been severely fragmented and decreased by canals dug throughout the middle of Tsushima — separating the island’s northern and southern halves — in 1671 and in 1900. There have been no confirmed reviews of the cats transferring between northern and southern Tsushima since then. This division of the island “was probably a blow for the cat population, as their original range was divided in half,” mentioned Masako Izawa, director of the Kitakyushu Museum of Natural History & Human History; Izawa has studied the Tsushima and Iriomote cats because the Eighties.
On the south island, the wildcat inhabitants steadily dwindled throughout the 1900s, with no sightings after 1984. But the cat reappeared there in 2007, when a digital camera lure photographed one. Izawa and different specialists say they imagine the southern inhabitants is at the moment rising.
“That’s good news for the Tsushima cat,” she mentioned. But now protections have to catch up: “Because people believed there were no cats on the south island, no roadkill prevention or housecat control measures were implemented there.”
In 1999, throughout the interval it was believed that the southern inhabitants had died out, the MOE began a captive-breeding program for the Tsushima cat. But up to now, no people bred in captivity have been launched into the wild, in keeping with Shibahara.
In 2021, a workforce at Yokohama Zoological Gardens efficiently bred a Tsushima cat for the primary time utilizing synthetic insemination. The kitten, now an grownup, resides at a zoo in Fukuoka prefecture and has even produced offspring.
Akinori Azumano, a veterinarian on the Yokohama Zoo who leads the unreal insemination undertaking there, has expressed skepticism concerning the conservation advantages of captive breeding. Tsushima cats are choosy about, and even violent towards, potential breeding companions, Azumano says, making pure breeding in captivity difficult. Artificial insemination additionally has a low success charge, and Azumano’s efforts since 2021 haven’t yielded any extra offspring. He prompt that in-habitat conservation would possibly in the end be extra practical.
“Just think how much more effective it would be to decrease a single roadkill accident” in contrast with the trouble it takes to breed one cat in captivity,” Azumano mentioned. From 1992 to January 2022, 122 Tsushima cats had been killed by autos. “But it’s no good to be critical [of conservation policies] without doing anything, so I am going to do my best and see if anything will change.”
When wildcats thrive, so do island ecosystems
Global conservation efforts are likely to focus disproportionately on species seen as helpful or enticing to folks — the latter of which applies to the Iriomote and Tsushima cats. But there’s one other pragmatic purpose for the trouble spent defending them.
“These cats are at the top of the food chains of their respective islands,” Izawa mentioned. For that purpose, “If the cats are thriving, it indicates that the whole environment, including all the other animals, is in good condition. And when there’s a species that can become a ‘star’ like the Iriomote cat, it becomes easier to explain the conservation of the whole ecosystem through it.”
But conservationists on Iriomote and Tsushima know vigilance is demanded.
“The population is currently stable, but we can’t have complete peace of mind,” mentioned the Iriomote Wildlife Conservation Center’s Ishihara. He listed ongoing issues: roadkill accidents, potential invasions by non-native vegetation and animals, and habitat injury from escaped home goats.
As for Tsushima, the wildlife conservation middle there hopes to substantiate an rising variety of feminine cats on the southern island by 2026, and goals for steady, breeding populations on each the north and south islands by 2051.
But with a lot of Tsushima’s land privately owned, Shibahara, the conservation middle ranger, says he typically feels powerless to guard the cats. And he proposes a change in perspective. “I think that, going forward, we need a new model for conservation, one that respects the livelihoods of the various people living in that environment. After all, it’s not like Japan’s nature is completely untouched,” he mentioned.
To that finish, the conservation middle is working with its neighbors, a gaggle of ecologically minded farmers formally often called the Sago Agricultural Group for Future of Farmer and Tsushima Cat. (Sago, a district in northern Tsushima, has one of many islands’ largest concentrations of wildcats.)
“Our number one activity is maintaining the rice paddy environment,” mentioned member Yu Arikawa. She defined that when rice fields, an vital wetland ecosystem acknowledged by the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, are deserted attributable to rural human inhabitants decline, the ensuing dry habitat turns into much less hospitable to Tsushima cats and their prey. Unfortunately for the cats, solely about 1% of Tsushima is now occupied by farmland.
The group’s rice farmers attempt to promote wholesome habitat by minimizing their use of agricultural chemical compounds, and since 2022 have began amassing cat feces to investigate the variety of cats within the space and decide their dietary habits. The Sago farmers additionally ship pictures of Tsushima cats and different wildlife discovered on their lands to their common clients to assist unfold the phrase and build assist for the island’s nature.
Arikawa reviews that Tsushima has seen an inflow in vacationers from close by South Korea in recent years, however she says Tsushima’s dwindling human inhabitants seemingly contributed extra to roadkill deaths of wildcats. As neighborhood faculties shut down and the remaining college students are compelled to commute longer distances by college bus, higher bus-friendly roads on which individuals are likely to drive sooner have been constructed, in keeping with Arikawa.
It’s these youth who now have a few of the highest consciousness about Tsushima cat conservation, thanks largely to academic outreach by the wildlife conservation middle.
The island’s youngsters “are very knowledgeable about and interested in the cat,” Arikawa mentioned. “They know to be careful to avoid traffic accidents, and they feel the cat is something to be protected.”
Banner picture: The Iriomote cat (Prionailurus bengalensis iriomotensi). Image courtesy of the Iriomote Wildlife Conservation Center.
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Citations:
Masuda, R., & Yoshida, M. C. (1995). Two Japanese wildcats, the Tsushima cat and the Iriomote cat, present the identical mitochondrial DNA lineage because the leopard cat Felis bengalensis. Zoological Science, 12(5), 655-659. doi:10.2108/zsj.12.655
Azumano, A., Ueda, M., Nomura, M., Usui, M., Ichinose, M., Yanagawa, Y., … Murata, Okay. (2022). Successful laparoscopic oviductal synthetic insemination within the endangered Tsushima leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis euptilurus). Animals, 12(6), 777. doi:10.3390/ani12060777
Izawa, M., Doi, T., Nakanishi, N., & Teranishi, A. (2009). Ecology and conservation of two endangered subspecies of the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) on Japanese islands. Biological Conservation, 142(9), 1884-1890. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2009.05.005
Small, E. (2011). The new Noah’s Ark: Beautiful and helpful species solely. Part 1. Biodiversity conservation points and priorities. Biodiversity, 12(4), 232-247. doi:10.1080/14888386.2011.642663
