JANUARY
20, 2016
by
Brett Smith
The
bush dog is one of the most elusive canid species in the world, rarely seen
across its range of Central and South America. Yet, a new collection of photos taken
by robotic camera traps reveal the species to be prevalent in Panama.
The
photos and a report on the status of the bush dog in Panama were published
in the Canid Biology & Conservation journal.
Bush
dogs are short-legged and stand only around a foot tall at the shoulder. They
live primarily in tropical forests, but have been documented in disparate and
modified habitats. Hunting in groups of up to 10 animals, bush dogs make
high-pitched whines to reach out to each other and yap like puppies when they
run after their prey. They mostly eat large forest rodents, but at one location
in Brazil, they primarily ate armadillos. Ferocious for their size, a pack of
six was documented chasing a tapir, an animal nearly 20 times a bush dog's
weight.
Even
though the dogs are active by day, bush dogs are amazingly difficult to see and
are hardly ever reported even where they are known to inhabit. Camera traps,
which capture pictures automatically when their infrared sensors identify an
animal's body heat, were arranged as part of research for other mammals, and
the cameras luckily snapped photos of bush dogs at four locations, between
Cerro Pirre near the Colombian border to Santa Fe National Park in the western
part of the country. Notably, photos were acquired on only 11 occasions out of
over nearly 32,000 camera-days (the quantity of cameras times the amount of
days in operation).
Panama
is the only country in Central America where the species is recognized as
inhabiting, apart from a few unconfirmed sightings in easternmost Costa Rica
close to the Panamanian border.
"We
think that it will soon cross the border into Costa Rica," study author
Ricardo Moreno, a Smithsonian research associate, said in a statement.
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