What you’re looking at is the world’s rarest cat. This is a leopard subspecies that
lives in Eastern Russia and a 2007 study counted only about 30 individuals in total.
This footage comes to us from a camera trap, which is a camera that's triggered by heat and motion
and can be left in the wilderness for weeks at a time. Using thousands of photos from
cameras like these, scientists recently found that the Amur leopards have actually doubled in number
in less than a decade.
Camera traps are especially useful for monitoring rare and elusive animals whose habitat is
difficult to survey, such as the Snow Leopard, which lives at an altitude of 10,000 feet
in the mountains of central Asia. Or the rare Andean Mountain Cat, which lives even higher
in the Andes in South America.
The endangered Bay Cat had never been filmed before 2009. That's when a camera trap caught this
short clip. Scientists know next to nothing about the biology of this animal, which lives
only on the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia.
And in 2011, a camera trap captured the first known video footage of the African Golden
Cat. This is a species that few researchers have ever seen in person. And then earlier this year, a
camera trap caught this incredible clip of a Golden Cat in action.
The idea of photographing animals remotely has been around for a while. The first camera
traps used trip wire and loud powder flash guns, which must have terrified the animals,
but the images were captivating. When National Geographic published these images in 1906,
they were the first wildlife photos to ever appear in the magazine.
But it just wasn’t practical for widespread use until the technology caught up. It was
actually demand from hunters that really spurred the commercial market and with the switch
from film to digital, the number of scientific studies using camera traps has increased year after year.
Most camera traps today have what’s called a passive infrared sensor, which detects the
sudden changes in temperature when an animal walks into frame. For nighttime, they’re
equipped with either a regular flash, or an infrared flash, which provides less clarity
but won’t startle the animals.
Camera traps really showed their scientific value starting in the 1990s when scientists
studying Bengal tigers in India began combining camera trap images with statistical software.
This let them produce measurements of things like tiger abundance and density, which are
necessary for any conservation plan.
Tigers and many other cat species essentially wear their fingerprints on the sides of their
bodies with these unique markings. So if you want to estimate the total population in an
area, you set cameras out and get a sample of cats that you can identify. And then you do it again. The number of cats
photographed twice gives you enough information to approximate what the total population is.
It’s an adaptation of an older method that involved actually capturing and tagging animals,
but instead of tagging them, you just photograph them.
This was the method used in a recent study of Saharan cheetahs in Algeria which found
that this critically endangered subspecies is living at extremely low densities.
Camera traps also have some law enforcement applications. Conservation groups are starting
to use cameras to catch poachers and they can send the images in instantly over cell
phone networks. Right now about 80% of wild cat species are believed to be declining, and
several are critically endangered, like the tiger. Just a century ago there were 100,000
tigers in the world, and now there are around 3200.
The population of Sumatran Tigers in Indonesia is down to 450. And this video from a camera
trap in what was supposed to be a protected area, shows part of the reason why.