Critically Endangered
Malabar large-spotted civet
Viverra civettina
The Malabar large-spotted civet, also known as the Malabar civet, is a viverrid endemic to the Western Ghats of India.
Appearance
The Malabar large-spotted civet is dusky gray. Its throat and neck are white.
A male individual kept in the Zoological Gardens of Trivandrum in the 1930s measured 30 in (76 cm) in head and body with a 13 in (33 cm) long tail and weighed 14.5 lb (6.6 kg).
Range and habitat
In the 19th century, the Malabar civet occurred throughout the Malabar coast from the latitude of Honnavar to Kanyakumari. It inhabited the forests and richly wooded lowland, and was occasionally found on elevated forest tracts. Until the 1960s, extensive deforestation has reduced most of the natural forests in the entire stretch of the coastal Western Ghats.
Until the 1990s, it was confined to remnant forests and disturbed thickets in cashew and rubber plantations in northern Kerala, where the hunting pressure was another major threat.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
The Malabar civet is considered nocturnal and so elusive that little is known about its biology and ecology apart from habitat use.
In crisis
It is listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List as the population is estimated to number fewer than 250 mature individuals. In the early 1990s, isolated populations still survived in less disturbed areas of South Malabar but were seriously threatened by habitat destruction and hunting outside protected areas. It is now seriously threatened by habitat destruction and fragmentation.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix III. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Malabar large-spotted civet is Critically 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 Malabar large-spotted civet, Wikidata item Q389266. 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.
