How fishing cats Prionailurus viverrinus Bennett, 1833 fish: describing a felid’s strategy to hunt aquatic prey

Abstract

The fishing cat’s persistence in a ‘semi-aquatic niche’ suggests the evolution of a successful hunting strategy. We describe it for the first time by analysing 197 camera-trap video-clips, collected from a participatory-science initiative, within an ethogram framework^. The cats spent ∼52% of the time sitting and waiting for prey (fishes) to come nearer and took limited attempts to hunt (3.89%) in deeper waters (in which the upper portions of the cat’s body were submerged), where its hunting success was found to be 42.86%. In shallow waters, it adopted a predominantly active mode of hunting (∼96%) to flush out prey.