The investigation, carried out by Manuel Ruiz Garcia, the institution’s specialist in genetics and evolution, lasted more than two decades. A recent edition of the scientific magazine genes announced the discovery of the new species of feline in Colombia: the Narino cat.
According to inquiry, the popular science magazine of Javeriana, the discovery was made in 2001 when Ruiz, along with one of his students, were looking for information on the jaguar and the puma. The research was carried out in the biological collections of the Research Institute of Biological Resources Alexander von Humboldt, in Villa de Leyva.
These are repositories that jealously guard information on organisms such as birds, mammals, reptiles, insects and plants, which serve as a biological encyclopedia for scientists who will be able to refer to it for centuries.
“When they got to the ocelot drawer, they took out the skins and put them next to each other. This Xaverian researcher and professor immediately noticed something peculiar: one of the skins was very different from the others, its fur was dense and woolly, colored in reddish tones that darkened on the head and neck, its shape accounted for a head flat and rounded, very different from that of the tigrillo, which has a prominent snout”, details inquiry.
It was a sample collected in the páramo of the Galeras volcano. It had been donated in 1989 to the old National Institute of Renewable Natural Resources and the Environment (Inderena). In 1993, the Humboldt Institute housed its biological collections, so the curious skin, which had gone unnoticed until the arrival of Ruiz García, came into its custody.
“The skins of jaguars and ocelots are very homogeneous with each other., ocelots have some variation. But it is that this was very different, ”said Ruiz. At first, he suspected a species that had not been reported in Colombia at the time.
The scientist took some photos of the strange skin and sent them to Rosa Garcia Pereaof the Museum of Natural Sciences of Madrid, maximum specialist worldwide. Her response sowed more doubts than certainties: “she replied: this is not a colocolo, is one of those rare ocelots that occasionally appear”, commented the Xaverian professor.
The scientist took a small sample of the skin that he used to sequence the individual’s DNA. Therefore, along with the researcher Myreya Pinedomade a comparison of the samples by means of two different tests.
In the first they used microsatellites, that is, small pieces of DNA that serve as markers to differentiate individuals, and that, in fact, are used in human paternity tests. The second test used mitochondrial markersgenetic sequences within the mitochondria that are only inherited by the mother and serve to distinguish species more accurately.
Both tests yielded surprising results: “this specimen was still not grouped with the other ocelots, it appeared together with two species of spotted cats from the south of the continent, andl Huina and the Geoffroy’s cat. “Regardless of whether we used one type of marker or another, the result was the same,” explained Ruiz. This could only mean one thing: It was a new species that the researcher decided to call gato de narino either leopardus narinensis”.
The Nariño cat is a species that diverged from its closest relatives, the huina and the cat of Geoffroyabout a million years ago. According to the researcher, it is possible that the common ancestor of these three species may have had a distribution from southern Colombia to Patagonia.
However, the climatic changes at the end of the Pleistocene, the time in which the mammoth lived, surely caused a small population to remain isolated on the Galeras volcano and give rise to this new species.
“I have been in Nariño and when I have shown the photograph to people they say ‘No, we do not recognize it’, so it is a bug that had gone unnoticed by science and, in principle, by a good part of the people of the area,” Ruiz said. The most curious thing of all is that this skin is the only proof of the existence of the Gato de Nariño.
