The smallest wild African cat is disappearing, and conservationists may not be able to save it from extinction.

What’s going on?

Weighing just a few pounds and resembling a domestic cat, the black-footed cat lives only in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. mongabay reported. There are 10,000 individuals in the wild, and the population has been declining for 500,000 years.

According to January, the animal is threatened by habitat loss and degradation, changing climate and disease. to work. Habitat fragmentation, “harmful genetic mutations” and lack of genetic diversity are contributing to inbreeding in a 3-million-year-old species that has been linked to the fatal disease amyloidosis.

Predators such as caracals and black-backed jackals also kill a large portion of cats. While big cats such as lions, leopards and cheetahs are being driven to extinction by humans, these medium-sized predators are taking their place in the range of black-footed cats.

Due to increasingly frequent and severe droughts in Namibia, black-footed cats are also being dragged into inhospitable river beds. In a study last year, all of the black-footed cats in the sample died.

Why is this important?

Genetic study has helped understand the rare breed, which is perhaps the “cutest” cat on the continent, according to Mongabay. Black-footed cats have evolved to be extremely successful hunters with excellent hearing and the ability to track fast-moving objects. They eat 20% of their body weight in prey each night.

But their problems include the fact that almost 40% of the populations studied die each year. In the future, increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather conditions – like in Namibia years of drought — will only add to the topics.

“There is literally a complete collapse of the population in my study areas right now,” Alexander Sliwa of the Black-Footed Cat Working Group told Mongabay.

The study’s authors underlined “the urgency of investigating genomic variations that are integral to ecological balance and biodiversity and formulating effective strategies for small felids.”

But the most important aspect of protecting sensitive species is financing. Without the money to do the work, researchers can’t produce data that will stimulate conservation efforts.

“For the black-footed cat and other threatened species, understanding genetic susceptibility to disease is important, Sliwa says, but alone is not enough to protect wild populations,” Mongabay said. “For this, you need field data and funding to support conservation efforts on the ground,” he adds.

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