This is no hungry housecat pawing at the cat flap. It's a wild ocelot and its fetching collar sports a radio tracker instead of a bell.
Researchers fitted the collars to ocelots on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal and to their favourite snack, rodents called agoutis. By tracking them 24 hours a day, they aimed to understand the relationship between predator and prey.
The advice to agoutis turns out to be: be home before sunset and lay low until sunrise.
Agoutis (above) are most active in daytime, gathering palm seeds for stashing away in burrows that they occupy at night. Ocelots, meanwhile, prowl primarily in darkness. Patrick Jansen of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and his team found that the rodents were most vulnerable if they carried on foraging after sunset or began before sunrise – the only times when predator and prey are at large simultaneously. Agoutis were tempted out to forage in these hours of danger in areas where food was scarce.
Journal reference: Animal Behaviour, DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2013.11.012
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