A hidden camera has caught extremely rare footage of a family of endangered Bornean clouded leopards (Neofelis diardi borneensis) as they scamper and prowl around the rainforest.
Orangutan Foundation, together with Tanjung Puting National Park, recently captured the adorable video (below) using a camera trap in the dense lowland forests of Indonesian Borneo. While the rare subspecies has been filmed in the wild before, this is the first time researchers have spotted a mother with her two offspring.
“The clouded leopard is an arboreal species and excellent hunter on the ground that plays an important role in maintaining the ecosystem. As one of the rarest species to find, being able to see a female and cubs gives us evidence that they are healthy and actively breeding,” Anxious Yoga Perdana, Research Manager, said in a statement.
The Tanjung Puting National Park is abundant in wonderful wildlife, including the largest wild orangutan population in the world, 230 species of birds, nine species of primates, and two species of crocodiles.
Arguably the region’s cutest resident, the Bornean clouded leopard is a subspecies of the Sunda clouded leopard that lives on the island of Borneo. The other subspecies, the Sumatran clouded leopard, lives on the neighboring island of Sumatra (no surprises there).
Genetic analysis suggests the two clouded leopards diverged from wild cats on the mainland around 1.4 million years ago. The Bornean clouded leopard then diverged from the Sumatran clouded leopard in the Late Pleistocene, a period that ended some 11,700 years ago, when a wave of global cooling and warming severed the islands of Borneo and Sumatra from each other.
One idea is that the split of the two subspecies is linked to the “super eruption” of the Toba volcano in Sumatra around 74,000 years ago – a catastrophic even that was arguably humanity’s closest call with extinction yet.
So the theory goes, clouded leopards from Borneo recolonized Sumatra in the wake of the super eruption during times of low sea levels, but were then separated from their source population by rising sea levels. As the separated populations adapted to their different niches and reproduced, they evolved into distinct subspecies.
A 2007 estimate suggested that between 5,000 and 11,000 clouded leopards lived in Borneo, but that number has almost certainly dropped since then. Orangutan Foundation states the Bornean clouded leopard is classified as an Endangered species by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. As a result of habitat loss from deforestation, their population numbers have been reduced to less than a third in recent years.
They aren’t the only life that’s imperilled by habitat loss in Borneo. The island’s most iconic and beloved animal, the orangutan, has also fallen victim to rampant deforestation driven by the demand for palm oil and timber.
