What happened when a wildcat and a small mammal met in the park? Dinner!
This joke isn’t just bad — it’s actually inaccurate. Scientists using camera traps in the Amazon uncovered an extraordinary behavioral pattern between a wildcat species called the ocelot and an opossum.
Multiple video clips showed the two animals walking together “like old friends,” as the scientists described.
The footage was captured by a team from Germany and Peru working at the Cocha Cashu Biological Station in Peru’s Manu National Park. Although they initially set out to study bird behavior, they were stunned when they reviewed a video showing an ocelot casually following a common opossum. They immediately shifted focus.
After both animals walked out of frame, they returned two minutes later — in the same order — heading in the opposite direction.
Curious, the scientists reached out to colleagues, only to find that this wasn’t an isolated event. Their findings, published in the journal Ecosphere, document four separate occurrences of this behavior.
While ocelots are known to prey on opossums, each sighting occurred in a different part of the Peruvian Amazon, proving these weren’t the same individual animals. The observations span from 2019 to 2023.
In a particularly striking instance captured in 2022 at the El Gato Concession in Madre de Dios, the ocelot and opossum were seen not just walking together, but interacting. Although the ocelot seemed to briefly pounce, the opossum showed no signs of fear or stress before that.
“Even though we still do not know if this is the case, we could be witnessing the South American counterpart to the well-known partnership between coyotes and badgers in North America,” said Dr. Isabel Damas-Moreira, a behavioral ecologist at Bielefeld University in Germany and the study’s senior author.
These types of interspecies relationships are especially fascinating, she added, “because they can develop even between unrelated species.”
Additional experiments revealed that opossums are strongly attracted to ocelot scent, often rubbing against scent samples from ocelots while ignoring those from other predators like pumas. This suggests the opossums may be actively seeking out ocelots.
Why? The researchers have two hypotheses:
- The ocelot may benefit from the opossum’s foraging skills.
- The ocelot might use the opossum’s scent to disguise its own presence from prey.
“This discovery was accidental. It reminds us how important it is to observe closely — because nature is often more complex than we think,” Damas-Moreira said in a statement.