Endangered
Andean mountain cat
Leopardus jacobita
The Andean mountain cat is a small wild cat native to the high Andes that has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List because fewer than 1,500 individuals are thought to exist in the wild.
Appearance
The Andean mountain cat has ashy-gray fur, a grey head, and rounded ears. The nose and lips are black, and the areas around them are white. Two dark brown lines run from the corners of the eyes across the cheeks. There are black spots on the forelegs, yellowish-brown blotches on the flanks, and up to two narrow, dark rings on the hind limbs.
The skulls of adult specimens range in length from 100.4 to 114.8 mm (3.95 to 4.52 in) and are larger than those of the pampas cat and the domestic cat.
The Andean mountain cat was first described by Emilio Cornalia, who named it in honor of Jacobita Mantegazza.
Range and habitat
The Andean mountain cat lives only at high elevations in the Andes. This terrain is arid, sparsely vegetated, rocky and steep showing that the Andean Mountain Cat prefers a temperate and terrestrial habitat. Deep valleys fragment its habitat in the Andes, and its preferred prey, mountain viscachas (Lagidium), occurs in patchy colonies.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The viscacha comprises 93.9% of the biomass consumed in the Andean cat's diet, while the pampas cat depends on it for 74.8%. Both cats depend on specific prey for their dietary needs.
In some areas, the mountain viscacha makes up 53% of the Andean cat's prey items despite making up the vast majority of the biomass that it consumes. This difference is because the mountain viscacha is significantly larger in biomass than the other prey animals that the Andean cat hunts. Due to kittens being seen in April and October, the mating season could extend into November or December, although not much information is known about their breeding habits.
In crisis
The Andean mountain cat is a small wild cat native to the high Andes that has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List because fewer than 1,500 individuals are thought to exist in the wild. Such factors as habitat loss and degradation, hunting, and disease threaten the Andean cat.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Andean mountain cat is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Andean mountain cat, Wikidata item Q213047. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
