Scientists are trying to understand footage that showed ocelots and opossums, usually predator and prey, hanging out together.
Screenwriters in search of the next Timon and Pumbaa may want to look to the Amazon, where unlikely ocelot-opossum duos have been filmed hanging out together.
Researchers at Cocha Cashu Biological Station in southeastern Peru set up a camera trap to study bird behavior, but they got a surprise guest appearance instead: an ocelot trailing an opossum through the jungle at night. The ocelot, a wild cat slightly larger than a house cat, and the common opossum, a marsupial, are usually predator and prey. But in this video, they moved in tandem.
“We were skeptical about what we had seen,” said Isabel Damas-Moreira, behavioral ecologist at Bielefeld University in Germany. Perhaps the ocelot was shadowing its dinner-to-be to learn about its behavior, they wondered, although that didn’t explain the opossum’s laid-back behavior. Then came a second clip: the same odd couple wandering back along the trail minutes later.
“Like two old friends walking home from a bar,” Dr. Damas-Moreira said.
Intrigued, they contacted researchers in other parts of the Amazon who turned up three additional, nearly identical videos from different locations and years.
Dr. Damas-Moreira and her colleagues then set up an experiment, which they described last month in the journal Ecosphere. They left strips of fabric infused with ocelot scent, puma scent and a control in front of camera traps.
Opossums visited the ocelot scent 12 times, often lingering to rub against, sniff or bite the fabric. The puma scent attracted just one brief visit.